Bangladesh has received its first doses of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, with the arrival of 336,000 doses on Thursday.
The shipment was procured as US aid through the COVAX programme.
“The Johnson & Johnson vaccine arrived in Bangladesh for the first time on Thursday, said Dr Shamsul Haque, the chief of the Directorate General of Health Service’s Expanded Programme on Immunization. “They will be stored like the other vaccines.”
The J&J shot is the sixth Covid vaccine to arrive in Bangladesh. The others are the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Sinopharm, and Sinovac. These vaccines have all been a part of the government’s nationwide immunisation efforts, reports bdnews24.com.
According to the DGHS, Bangladesh had administered the first COVID vaccine dose to 91.32 million people across the country as of Wednesday. The most commonly used vaccine for the first dose was the Sinopharm shot, 50.5 million of which were used.
The second was AstraZeneca, with 17.8 million doses, Pfizer with 15.5 million doses, Sinovac with 4.4 million doses, and Moderna with 2.8 million doses.
As of Wednesday, 57.6 million people received the second dose of the vaccine and more than 873,000 have received the third dose, which is also known as the booster dose.
Health Minister Zahid Maleque noted at an event on Wednesday that the government had approximately 90 million vaccines in stock.