Staff Correspondent:
Dhaka, Sept-11,
Around 54 lakh more
doses of the Sinopharm vaccine arrived in Dhaka from China in the small hours
of Saturday.
A regular flight of
Biman Bangladesh Airlines landed at Dhaka's Hazrat Shahjalal International
Airport at 12.44 am with the vaccine consignment, Dr Shahriar Sazzad, in-charge
of the airport health camp, said.
"Md Shamsul Haque,
a line director at the Directorate General of Health Services, received the
consignment at the airport," he told media.
The consignment is
actually part of the commercial purchase from China, said Deputy Chief of
Mission at the Chinese Embassy in Dhaka, Hualong Yan.
This is so far the
second-largest batch of vaccine doses commercially purchased by Bangladesh from
China.
"As a strategic
partner of Bangladesh, China will always remain the most reliable supplier
whatever and whenever the country needs," Hualong said.
With the new doses,
China will have supplied over two crore doses of Sinopharm to Bangladesh
commercially.
Another 2.4 million
doses have also been received from China as bilateral assistance.
Bangladesh has so far
received Sinopharm vaccine doses from China as a gift, under COVAX facility,
and commercial purchase.
Prime Minister Sheikh
Hasina recently told Parliament that the government had made arrangements to
get more than one crore Covid-19 jabs every month.
According to the
schedule received from the company producing Sinopharm, two crore shots will be
available every month from October and six crore from December, she added.
On August 16,
Bangladesh, China and Incepta Vaccine Limited signed a memorandum of
understanding (MoU) on the co-production of the Sinopharm vaccine in
Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is now
administering vaccines developed by four companies -- AstraZeneca,
Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Sinopharm.
The government has
administered at least 33,699,773 doses of the four Covid vaccines – enough to
have immunized around 10% of the country's population, assuming every person
needs two doses.
Bangladesh has
administered 10,990,721 shots of Sinopharm as the first dose and 5,784,265 as
the second dose so far.
Since the start of the
Covid pandemic, the country has recorded 1,527,215 infections and 26,832
deaths, according to the Directorate General of Health Services.
The Covid vaccines
cannot offer 100% protection but when more people are jabbed there is less
opportunity for the virus to infect and spread, say experts.
Getting vaccinated
prevents severe illness, hospitalisations, and death; and with the Delta
variant, this is more urgent than ever, according to the US Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
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