Bangladesh has set a target of bringing 80 per cent of citizens under the COVID-19 vaccination programme by next year.
Director General (DG) of Directorate General of Health Service (DGHS) Prof Dr Abul Bashar Mohammad Khurshid Alam told BSS that the government has taken preparations to purchase roughly 140 million vaccine doses by June next year.
He informed that the rest of the required jabs would be procured in the subsequent months to implement the plan.
According to DGHS data, Bangladesh so far has collected around 16.1 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines. Around 11.8 million people have got registered to take the vaccine doses. As of July 25, nearly 7.35 million people received their first shot and over 4.3 million took two doses.
The DGHS DG said the government will launch a full-scale vaccination campaign in rural areas as well after receiving enough doses of the vaccines.
He informed that they have started exploring alternative ways for the registration process to vaccinate 130 million people out of a total of 170 million by 2022.
The DGHS chief's comments came a day after authorities lowered the recipients’ age limit to 18 years from 30 against the backdrop of brutal onslaughts of deadly Delta variant of coronavirus.
National technical advisory committee (NTAC) on Covid-19 president Professor Mohammad Shahidullah said the country should vaccinate 10 million people every month or 400,000 people every day.
He also suggested an easier registration process to quicken the inoculation drive as vaccines of different companies have specific efficacy periods.
"Quick vaccination coverage will reduce both infection and fatality rate," he said.