Reza Mahmud :
Mammoth rush of jab seekers crowded the capital’s vaccination centers on Wednesday.
Many returned with disappointment, as the officials found it hard to administer all of them.
Meanwhile, hundreds of expatriates demonstrated on the Shahid Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital campus to get getting Pfizer vaccine.
When contacted, Dr. Md. Khalilur Rahman, Director of the hospital said to The New Nation on Wednesday, “The foreign bound workers demonstrated when there was no stock at hand at that time.”
He said, “We have urged them to take Moderna vaccine which is also accepted in foreign countries, but they refused to take that.”
The vaccination programme was suspended for several hours due to their demonstration, he added.
Later, the officials from the Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment came and showed the migrant workers documents that both the Moderna and Pfizer were equally granted in the host countries, then the protesters became calm, the director said.
Officials said, the people who failed to show SMS, were not given vaccines.
A total of 1,38,167 first dose vaccines were administered to the people on Wednesday, while, 69,623 people on Tuesday.
It may be mentioned that giving of Moderna vaccine began on Tuesday.
Besides, the health authority had inoculated 50,271 jabs among the people on July12 and 44,762 shots only on July11.
Meanwhile the inoculation of second dose is lower because the vaccination of first dose was in a pause for several weeks that decreased the number of second dose seekers.
The DGHS press release showed that only 293 people were given second dose covid-19 vaccine on Wednesday, while it administered 355 shots of the second dose jabs on Tuesday.
Officials and witnesses said that numbers of people were rushed to the vaccination centers in the recent days. The gathering was increasing day by day while the authorities also were gearing up its efforts to administer maximum doses getting the number of vaccines from different sources have been arrived in the country.
The health authorities said that the vaccine seekers have been rising day by day due to the recent surge of death and infections on account of the Indian (delta) variant of the coronavirus.
DGHS sources said, a total of 95,84,559 people had registered so far for getting a jab.
Sources said, the people had not showed so much interest to be registered in the first days of the starting of the registrations.
But after the surge of the infections in recent weeks on account of delta variant transmissions, numbers of vaccine seekers began to be registered.
As a result the website and the mobile apps failed to render services to the outnumbered people at a time.
Bangladesh started its mass vaccination campaign in February, using the AstraZeneca vaccine. But the programme was suspended after India banned vaccine exports.
The inoculation drive was resumed after the country received consignments of Sinopharm and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. As of now, Bangladesh has about 15.9 million doses of corona virus vaccines in stock, including Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Sinopharm vaccines.
