A shipment of 600,000 Sinopharm vaccine doses has arrived in Dhaka.
Two planes from the Bangladesh Air Force left for China at 10 am on Sunday to pick up the doses of the vaccine and arrived back in Dhaka at the Air Force Base Bangabandhu at 5:30pm.
M Shamsul Haque, a Covid vaccine taskforce official, received the gift from China after the shipment was deplaned, reports bdnews24.com.
The vaccines will be taken to the Mohakhali EPI storage centre, Haque told the media.
“Alongside the vaccines, the Chinese Communist Party has also gifted Bangladesh’s Awami League with some medical equipment.”
EPI Program Manager Mowla Baksh Chowdhury was also present during the arrival of the vaccines.
“The vaccines will be stored at the prescribed temperature and will be used soon,” he said.
Bangladesh started its mass vaccination campaign in February using COVISHIELD, the vaccine developed by the UK's University of Oxford and Anglo-Swedish company AstraZeneca.
Despite an agreement on 30 million jabs, its manufacturer Serum Institute of India had sent only seven million doses in two shipments before India froze the export of the vaccine to tackle its own devastating crisis.
It prompted Bangladesh to halt the first dosing of the vaccine, while many who received the first shot were not given the second one.
In a bid to mitigate the crisis, the government reached out to China and Russia for vaccines. China has already sent 500,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine as a gift.
Later, China said it would gift another 600,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccine to Bangladesh. The latest coronavirus vaccine developed by Sinovac Life Sciences Company has been approved for emergency use in Bangladesh as the second vaccine from China.
