The government is now waiting for a green signal from the World Health Organization for inoculating children and adolescents. The issue of vaccinating the group of minors has got government’s focus only five days ahead of reopening their educational institutions on September 12. This one example gives a clear message how callous and casual our health and education ministries are! They had no idea about how to deal with such a highly sensitive issue. Even if the WHO allows the government now, is it possible to inoculate about four crore students before the school opening?
We can’t understand why the government has taken such a whimsical decision apparently devising no plan about the little pupils. The government has not yet prepared any guideline in this regard. What’s very shocking to us is that over 2 crore people (apart from students) are now waiting to get SMS (short message service) from the Directorate General of Health Services. They all have registered their names downloading the ‘Surakha’ app. Some of them have done registration about two months ago but they haven’t yet got the desired SMS to know their inoculation date.
In fact there is a gulf of difference between the statements of health officials and actual stock of vaccines; though the health minister recently said about 16 crore doses of Covid-19 vaccines would reach the country in the next five months. So far as we understand, the government’s relevant ministry and departments have made the vaccination programme a total mess. Saturday’s meeting between Civil Surgeons and officials of ‘extension vaccination programme’ has exposed gross error over SMS service and other irregularities. But the health minister never feels embarrassed to hide the real scenario and talks of the possibility of getting vaccines from different uncertain sources.
As per official estimation (last week), a total of 4, 03, 00600 doses of vaccines, from different manufacturers including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna and Sinopharm so far have been received. Of them, 2,76, 07000 doses have been used and the rest are in hand. Out of the total stock, 10,00,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine couldn’t be used outside Dhaka for storage problems. We’re surprised at how the government is feeling so relaxed and so cheerful when the actual scenario says the opposite. At this moment there is very little difference between collection of vaccines and begging for vaccines as we earlier missed the opportunity to buy or produce vaccines in time.
