Kazi Zahidul Hasan :
Bangladesh’s vaccine shortage appears to be easing, as the country has been able to bolster fresh supplies from different sources.
The country is going to get nearly 1.09 crore Covid-19 vaccine doses from various sources by the end of July and 1.75 crore more vaccine doses are expected to arrive within the next one and half months, official sources said.
“Supply of Covid-19 vaccines will increase gradually from this month, helping Bangladesh inoculate most of the adult population by the end of next year (December, 2022),” a senior health ministry official told The New Nation on Friday asking not to be named.
He added, “Bangladesh will receive 50 lakh more Sinopharm jabs by the end of this month. By this time, the country will also get 30 lakh vaccine doses from Morderna.
Earlier, Bangladesh signed a deal with China to buy the Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine. China has so far supplied 20 lakh doses vaccines.
“About 30 lakh doses of Moderna Covid-19 vaccine will arrive in Bangladesh under COVAX facility on Monday,” Dr Shamsul Haque, Member-Secretary, Vaccine Management Core Committee told The New Nation.
He added: “The country will also receive a shipment of Oxford-AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccines in the current month.”
On February 7 this year, Bangladesh started a nationwide inoculation drive against coronavirus with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine procured from India.
But Bangladesh was forced to suspend administering the first dose of the vaccine on April 26 after India halted export to tackle its own crisis, causing supply shortage of vaccines to its next-door neighbour.
Bangladesh managed to get 70 lakh doses of vaccines from India as part of a commercial deal with Serum Institute India (SII), which is manufacturing Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
After a pause of two months, Bangladesh again started administering first dose by Sinopharm and Pfizer vaccine shots.
On June 1, Bangladesh received 100,620 doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.
About 60 lakh more Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine doses are expected to arrive in Bangladesh under COVAX facility in the first week of August, according to health ministry officials.
“Currently, two lakh people across the country are getting vaccinated every day. The number is too low to meet the target of inoculating all adult population (12.5 crore) by December next year. To reach the target, Bangladesh must accelerate the vaccination drive on a ‘massive scale’ bolstered by adequate supplies from foreign countries and COVAX,” Prof Muzaherul Huq, former adviser (Southeast Asia Region) of the World Health Organization (WHO) told The New Nation.
Around three per cent of Bangladesh population is so far vaccinated against Covid-19 compared with half of the population of the United Kingdom and the USA, according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data.
Another health ministry official said, Bangladesh will get 7.0 crore doses J&J Covid-19 in April next year. “We will be able to inoculate a big number of people by administering the Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines,” he added.
The government of Bangladesh has so far approved the emergency use of Oxford-AstraZeneca, Sinopharm (China), Sputnik-V (Russia), Pfizer-BioNTech (USA-Germany) and Crona Vac (China).
Meanwhile, Bangladesh will receive 20 lakh doses of Sinopharm vaccine from China today ( Saturday.
ABM Khurshid Alam, director general of Directorate General of Health Services, confirmed the matter to media on Friday.
“The Covid-19 vaccines will arrive in two separate flights, with the first set to land at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka at 11:45pm tomorrow (Saturday),” he added.
