The government has urged people to get their first doses of Covid-19 vaccines from walk-in centres until February 26, after which only the second and booster shots will be rolled out.
“We’re trying to bring discipline in vaccination,” Dr Shamsul Haque, Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) spokesperson and member secretary of the vaccination programme, told a virtual briefing on Wednesday.
He said the DGHS was working to inoculate 10 million people on the last day of the first dose administering.
He said that three teams at every union and municipality ward, five mobile teams at each upazila and 20 teams in every district would administer vaccines.
Haque said 30 teams would conduct vaccination drives in each zone of Dhaka city corporations; 40 in Narayanganj; 60 each in Barishal, Sylhet, Cumilla, Mymensingh; 25 in Khulna, Rajshahi, Chattogram and Rangpur.
Each team will vaccinate 300 people in unions, municipalities and upazilas and 500 people under city corporations.
People who have completed their registration but did not receive messages can visit their nearest vaccination centres to get inoculated.
Haque said there were enough vaccines and urged everyone to get jabbed.
On Tuesday, DGHS Director General Professor Dr ABM Khurshid Alam said they would halt administering the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine from Feb 26.
Bangladesh recorded its first Covid-19 cases on Mar 8, 2020, and announced the first fatality 10 days later. It launched a mass vaccination drive in February last year.
Until Tuesday, more than 100 million people received their first doses, 72 million people two doses and 2.8 million booster shots.
Bangladesh plans to vaccinate 70 per cent of its 170 million people following the standard of the World Health Organisation.
The country has approved eight Covid-19 vaccines for emergency use – Covishield, Sinopharm, Sinovac, Moderna, Pfizer, Sputnik V, Johnson and Johnson (single-dose vaccine) and Oxford-AstraZeneca.
Bangladesh is administrating AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Sinopharm, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, and Sinovac.
