Health Ministry partners with Google to enhance people\'s access to COVID-19 vaccine

New Delhi: Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Mansukh L Mandaviya on Wednesday said that the Health Ministry has partnered with Google to enhance people's access to the COVID-19 vaccine.

"The Ministry of Health has taken yet another significant initiative to enhance access to #COVID19 vaccine: Search 'covid vaccine near me' on Google, Check availability of slots and more, Use 'Book Appointment' feature to book a slot," tweeted Mandaviya today.

Mandaviya also shared the link of the official Google India blog, where people can find detailed information on vaccination availability near them.

According to the blog, in March 2021, Google started showing COVID-19 vaccination centres, in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Starting this week, for over 13,000 locations across the country, people will be able to get more helpful information about vaccine availability and appointments -- powered by real-time data from the CoWIN APIs (application programming interfaces). This includes information such as availability of appointment slots at each center, vaccines and doses offered (dose 1 or dose 2), expectations for pricing (paid or free) and the link to the CoWIN website for booking.

The above information will automatically show up when users search for vaccine centres near them, or in any specific area - across Google Search, Maps and Google Assistant. In addition to English, users can also search in eight Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, and Marathi.

Google in its blog also stated that it will continue to partner closely with the CoWIN team to extend this functionality to all vaccination centres across India.