Bangladesh on Wednesday began its vaccination campaign against the Covid-19 pandemic by giving the first shots to a group of frontline fighters at Kurmitola General Hospital in Dhaka, before rolling out the campaign on February 8 across the country for selected priority groups.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the vaccination campaign through videoconferencing from her official residence Ganabhaban around 4:07pm.
Runu Veronica Costa, a senior nurse at the Kurmitola General Hospital, was first to have been injected with Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine dose manufactured by Serum Institute of India (SII), after the inauguration of the vaccination campaign.
Bangladesh on January 25 received the first consignment of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine bought from the Serum Institute of India (SII) as 50 lakh doses of the vaccine arrived in Dhaka on a flight from India on the day.
Bangladesh, which has so far tallied over 8,000 Covid-19 deaths and 5.30 lakh cases, on November 5, 2020, signed the contract with the Serum Institute of India (SII) and its local vendor Beximco on the procurement of the three crore doses of the vaccine developed by Oxford University and British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and manufactured by the Serum.
Earlier, Bangladesh on January 20 received 20 lakh doses of the vaccine as a gift from India.
Being a low-income country, Bangladesh with a population of over 160 million people will also receive 6.8 crore doses of Covid-19 vaccines from the global vaccine alliance GAVI under a World Health Organisation pool of vaccines named COVAX formed to ensure the access of poor countries to vaccines.
The COVAX vaccines are due in the country by June 2021.
