The Serum Institute of India has been allowed by the country’s government to send 1.0 million doses of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine to Bangladesh, according to the local media.
The company can also send 1.0 million doses of the vaccine, called COVISHIELD, to Nepal and Myanmar each under the Vaccine Maitri programme, The Times of India reported citing official sources on Thursday.
The government also allowed state-owned Bharat Biotech to send 1.0 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, to Iran, according to the report.
India last month decided to resume vaccine exports in October “in the context of the current inoculation totals achieved in India's current vaccination drive and the scaling-up of production in the country”.
The Indian High Commission in Dhaka said on Sept 20 Bangladesh will be among the first to get vaccine doses from India when the exports resume.
India, the world's biggest maker of vaccines, stopped exports of COVID shots in April to focus on inoculating its own population as infections exploded.
The country's monthly vaccine output has since more than doubled and is set to quadruple to over 300 million doses next month, according to the government.
Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya had said that only excess supplies would be exported as India wants to vaccinate all its 944 million adults by December. Total production could top 1.0 billion in the last three months of the year as new vaccines from companies such as Biological E are likely to be approved, according to him.
Bangladesh signed a deal with the Serum Institute of India for 30 million doses of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine.
After India halted exports due to its own crisis, Bangladesh stopped administering the first doses to save second shots for the people who have had the first dose. It is yet to receive 23 million doses under the deal with the Serum Institute.
But Bangladesh was already short of enough doses to fully vaccinate all the citizens who have received the first dose.
More than 1.5 million people missed the second dose on expected dates. They were fully vaccinated after AstraZeneca vaccines arrived from Japan under the global sharing platform COVAX.
The inoculation drive in Bangladesh resumed after the government received consignments of Sinopharm vaccine from China, and Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines under COVAX.