Identity cards are not required anymore for Covid-19 vaccination, as the Ministry of Health and Population has decided not to seek identity cards for getting jabs.

Thousands of people throughout the country are estimated to have been deprived of Covid vaccination due to lack of identity cards.

“A ministerial meeting on Friday decided not to seek identity cards for vaccination,” said Dr Samir Kumar Adhikari, joint spokesperson for the Health Ministry. “Now everyone who is eligible but has been deprived of vaccination can get a jab from their nearby immunisation center.”

Until the decision, people needed to produce a citizenship certificate, passport or voter identity card for vaccination. Children between 12 and 17 years have been receiving the jabs showing their school identity cards.

A lot of people, who could not make the government identity cards—citizenship, passport, or voter identity cards–have been deprived of their right to get vaccinated and are at risk of severity and deaths from Covid infection.

“Yes, a lot of people in this country lack identity cards, which are needed for vaccination,” said Dr Bibek Kumar Lal, director at the Family Welfare Division under the Department of Health Services. “With the new decision, people can get the appropriate vaccine from nearby immunisation centers on self declaration.”

Earlier, the National Immunisation Advisory Committee had also recommended the government to remove the bureaucratic hassles and address the problem of identity cards, which deprived people from vaccination.

Landless squatters, those working in cities who missed their citizenship certificates at home, those who have not taken citizenship certificates due to various reasons, and foreign nationals working in Nepal have been deprived from Covid-19 vaccine.

Public health experts have been urging authorities concerned to pay attention to multiple factors, some of them minor, that have led to slowing down of the vaccination pace. They say that unnecessary rules, which are not even practical, are hindering the vaccination process.

“Vaccine is a universal right and authorities should administer the jabs to everyone without asking for their identification documents,” said Dr Baburam Marasini, former director at the Epidemiology and Disease Control Division. “This decision should have been taken a long ago and if that had happened the vaccine coverage would have increased.”

Experts say the risk of the spread of the virus will be high if a huge number of people are left unvaccinated. Chances of emergence of new variants will also increase from the unvaccinated population, they say.

“No one is safe until everyone is safe,” said Marasini. “All eligible people, whether they are Nepali or foreigners, should be vaccinated at the earliest.”

According to doctors, authorities should have rather come up with some effective measures so that more and more people could be brought under the vaccination coverage. On the one hand, say experts, authorities are introducing complicated rules and on the other hand, they have failed to launch any campaigns to bring members of the public to vaccination centres.

Marasini suggested authorities launch an awareness drive to tell people that identity cards are no longer necessary for Covid vaccination and that vaccination is necessary.

Nepal so far has received 46,599,920 doses of various Covid vaccines including AstraZeneca, Vero Cell, Moderna, Janssen and Pfizer-BioNTech.

Nepal needs to vaccinate around 26 million of the 29.1 million population, as around three million are children under five years of age. Authorities had decided to inoculate children between five and 11 years but no deal has been reached so far to purchase vaccines for them.

So far, 16,357,977people, or 56 percent of the total population, have been fully immunised against Covid.

On Sunday, 521 people tested positive—427 in 6,037 polymerase chain reaction tests and 94 in 4,078 antigen tests. In the last 24 hours, 10 people died of coronavirus infection. Active cases stand at 22,584 throughout the country.