Staff Reporter :
The Executive Director of Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) Dr Iftekharuzzaman said on Tuesday that uncertainty was looming over nationwide Covid-19 vaccination since the government depended on a single organisation.
“As a result, there is still no success in procuring vaccines despite the government’s efforts to procure from different sources,” he said while speaking at a virtual event on “Tackling Coronavirus Crisis: Good Governance Challenged in Covid-19 Vaccine Management.”
He said the government benefitted a third-party by assigning it for collecting vaccines which they could have done directly.
“In case of purchasing vaccines, the legal procedure has not been followed,” he commented.
Private hospitals charge up to Tk 5 lakh on an average for treatment of a Covid-19 patient as low-income middle class people are forced to go there due to shortage of ICU facilities in government hospitals, TIB said.
Dr Iftekharuzzaman also said, the government is hundred times more active to control information than wiping corruption.
Corruption in the health sector has been widely exposed in the media during the coronavirus pandemic and the government was seen to be very active to control the mass media. Many journalists have been harassed.
“The tendency to control information has been severe during Covid-19, and we have seen several such incidents including the one with journalist Rozina Islam. The government is hundred times more active in controlling information rather than controlling corruption,” Dr Iftekharuzzaman said.
At the event, Md Julkarnayeen, a research fellow and Deputy Program Manager of TIB, presented findings on Covid-19 management and vaccination.
Julkarnayeen said that the government could have saved Tk 231 crore if it collected vaccines directly from the Serum Institute of India.
“A large number of the population, mostly the middle class, has been forced to seek treatment at private hospitals due to lack of facilities in dedicated government Covid-19 hospitals,” TIB Deputy Programme Manager Md Julkarnayeen informed.
Besides, the research sheds light on the fact that the rate of inclusion of low-income, rural and impoverished people has been very low in the vaccination drive largely due to lack of publicity and complicated registration process.
The study found 43% of the vaccinated population facing problems in registering.
The inclusion of women under the vaccination drive was 37%, the study said.
Irresponsibility and lack of coordination between government bodies have caused sufferings to expatriates returning to overseas work. They have to spend an additional Tk60,000-70,000 each for not having a vaccination certificate.
The vaccine campaign was launched in February with Oxford’s AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India. An agreement was reached to procure 30 million doses of vaccines from Serum. As per the agreement, these vaccines were supposed to arrive in six months. But Bangladesh received only seven million vaccines in two consignments. Besides, the country received 3.3 million of vaccines as gift from the Indian government. India imposed a ban on the vaccines in March as the infections spread massively there. As a result, Bangladesh faces uncertainty over procuring vaccines. Now the government is trying to procure vaccines from alternative sources.
Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal said 80 per cent of people will be brought under vaccination programme in phases. He said this while delivering budget speech in parliament on Thursday.
Referring to the Finance Minister’s statement, Ifthekharuzzaman has said there is no strategic guideline as to how and from which source 80 per cent of people will be vaccinated. The government has not pointed up any road map for that. There was a flaw in the management in the beginning of Covid-19 and it still exists.
He said procurement rules have been flouted in purchasing vaccines. By engaging a third party, a total of Tk 2.31 billion has been given as profit. With this amount, some 6.8 million dose vaccines could be purchased.
The TIB research has been carried out taking quality and quantity into consideration. A survey was included in the research. As many as 1,387 people from 43 districts of eight divisions participated in it.
