The Centre has written to the states and Union Territories advising them not to share on public forums without consent data from the Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN) on vaccine stocks and the temperature of storage.

The government said such data were “owned” by the health ministry and were “sensitive information and to be used only for programme improvement”.

In a recent letter to the states, the Union health ministry said the Centre, with support from the United Nations Development Programme, had rolled out the eVIN system that is used to track vaccine stock status and the temperature at all levels of vaccine storage, from national to sub-district.

The health ministry said it was overwhelming to see that all states were using the system to update the stocks and transactions of Covid vaccines on a daily basis.

“In this regard, please be advised that data and analytics generated by eVIN for inventory and temperature are owned by the ministry of health and not to be shared with any other organisation, partner agency, media agency, online and offline public forums without the consent of the ministry,” the letter said.

“This is very sensitive information and to be used only for programme improvement,” said the letter written by Pradeep Haldar, adviser, reproductive and child health (RCH), to all mission directors of the National Health Mission.