Home ›› 27 Jan 2022 ›› Front
Bangladesh has administered 156 million Covid-19 vaccine doses since the country started inoculating its citizens a year ago against the virus.
The government initially planned to vaccinate 80 per cent of the population, but following World Health Organization’s guidelines, it revised the target to inoculate 70 per cent (119.2 million) of the people by June this year.
So far, 86.24 million or 72.3 per cent of the target population have registered through the Shurokkha App, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
Until now, 95.44 million people (80.5 per cent of the target population) received the first dose, 59.71 million (50 per cent) got the second dose and 1.26 million (1.06 per cent) got booster jabs.
On Friday, Health Minister Zahid Maleque said the country had 90 million doses in hand. “We’ve stocked up the doses to reach the target,” he said.
Bangladesh reported its first coronavirus cases on March 8, 2020, and the first fatality 10 days later. On January 27 last year, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the vaccination programme. The first shot of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was administered to nurse Runu Veronica Costa of the Kurmitola General Hospital in Dhaka.
On February 7, the country launched mass vaccination targeting people above 40. The age limit has been cut to 12 in phases.
Public health experts said that Bangladesh was still far from its target though mass vaccination drives continued and suggested scaling up the campaign. On December 29 last year, Maleque declared vaccinating 40 million people each month from January 2022, but the DGHS has not met the target.
DGHS Director Shamsul Haque, member secretary of the Vaccine Deployment Committee, said they were administering one million doses daily from 2,500 centres along with hospitals, community clinics and schools.
“Bangladesh is edging closer to its vaccination target,” he said. “We have received 240 million doses so far and several million are in the pipeline.”
He said vaccination is a challenging task for all nations. Bangladesh will meet the target soon as DGHS is conducting special campaigns.
“We have brought people from all classes and age groups under vaccine coverage. Now we will bring the dropout children as school students have been mostly vaccinated,” he said.
Bangladesh approved eight Covid vaccines for emergency use. They are Covishield of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine (Serum Institute of India), Sinopharm and Sinovac of China, Moderna and Pfizer of USA, Sputnik V of Russia, Johnson and Johnson Belgium (single-dose vaccine) and AstraZeneca of Sweden.
Bangladesh is administrating AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Sinopharm, Moderna and Sinovac.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh received its first 3,36,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as US aid through the Covax programme on January 20. Under Covax, Bangladesh will get vaccines for 20 per cent of its total population free of cost.
Public health expert Mohammad Mushtaq Husain said that until now, vaccine was the only curative measure that can be taken against Covid-19 and so, the government should emphasise it.
Health Minister Maleque said 85 per cent of the hospitalised Covid-19 patients were unvaccinated.
Bangladesh on Wednesday registered 15,527 new Covid-19 cases with a daily infection rate of 31.64 per cent. The country also logged 17 more deaths, pushing the tally to 28,273. The daily case positivity rate peaked at 32.55 per cent on July 24 last year.
