A parliamentary watchdog on Thursday suggested the authorities concerned for not allowing private management in the country's vaccination programme.
The parliamentary standing committee on Ministry of Foreign Affairs feared potential mismanagement under the private management like possibilities in import of expired vaccines.
At a meeting in the parliament secretariat, they also suggested importing vaccines having a minimum expiry date of six months.
Presided over by committee chairman Muhammad Faruk Khan, Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen, State Minister for Foreign Affairs Md Shahriar Alam and members of the committee Nurul Islam Nahid, Golam Faruk Khandakar Prince, Md Abdul Majid Khan and Md Habibe Millat attended the meeting.
The committee recommended no to take a decision of bringing the vaccination programme under private management by any means, Mr Khan told the media after the meeting.
"There might be incidents like importing expired vaccines, jabbing with water ... and, if such incidents take place, the blame would ultimately come on the neck of the government," he said.
Acknowledging that it was not the job of the ministry to talk about the issue, he said the committee, however, requested the ministry to check the date before importing the vaccines.
"Suppose a batch of vaccines arrived in Bangladesh, but the date would expire within 15-20 days. In such a case, the date would expire by the time those reach the grassroots level," he added.
Meanwhile, Health Minister Zahid Maleque at a separate programme said that another 10 million doses of vaccine would reach the country this month.
He informed that around 17.5 million people have so far taken the first shot of covid-19 vaccine while over 5.0 million have already completed their second doses.
He was speaking at a programme titled "Challenges of Covid Pandemic and Dengue Outbreak", organised by Bangladesh Society of Medicine in association with US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the city.
The minister said the government has been collecting vaccines from different sources - some came under the COVAX facility and some are purchased.
He also said the Prime Minister has recently approved the purchase of about 60 million doses of Sinopharm vaccine and the health ministry has already confirmed the deal.
Mr Maleque said that it would not be possible to inoculate all the people at once and the people need to keep patience as millions have already registered for the vaccination.
He also mentioned that the country does not have the capacity to store the huge amount of vaccine needed to inoculate 80 per cent of the population at once.
Bangladesh requires around 260 to 270 million doses of vaccine to cover at least 80 per cent of the population. So the government is collecting whichever is available right now, said the minister.
Urging the people to maintain health guidelines in public spaces, he said that it is not possible now to accommodate anymore patients in the hospitals as they reach full capacity.
Meanwhile, administering Moderna vaccine has been stopped from the day (Thursday) as half of the stock is preserved for the second dose.
Jabbing with US-made Moderna vaccine, came under the COVAX facility, had started on July 13 and continued for about a month.
By this time, however, the mass inoculation will continue across the country with Sinopharm vaccines.
According to the Directorate of General Health Services (DGHS), more than 30 million people have already registered for the vaccine.
Over 15 million people have already taken the first dose while about 5.0 million have taken both doses.
Currently, the government has about 8.7 million doses of vaccines of different brands in stock.
In a six-day campaign from August 7, Bangladesh targeted 3.2 million people to bring under the mass immunization programme.
However, about 4.7 million people have taken the vaccine in just the first three days of the drive.
Earlier, the health minister told reporters that the country would get 5.4 million doses of Sinopharm vaccine by August 15 while another 5.0 million shots of the same brand may arrive within this month as a gift under a bulk-buy agreement with Beijing.
At least 215 people died of Covid-19 and 10,126 more got infected with the deadly virus in the country during the last 24 hours until 8:00 am on Thursday.
The figures were lower comparing to the previous day's counts of 237 and 10,420 respectively, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
Of the total, the highest number of deaths during the last 24 hours was reported at 65 in Dhaka division, followed by 54 in Chattogram division, 28 in Khulna division, 22 in Sylhet division, 16 in Rangpur division, 12 in Barishal division, 10 in Mymensingh division and eight in Rajshahi division.
With the latest daily counts, the total number of deaths from Covid-19 reached 23,613 since the coronavirus was detected in the country in March 2020.
A total of 45,078 samples were tested, including antigen tests, during the last 24-hour reporting time while 44,988 samples were collected during the period.
However, the Covid-19 test positivity rate dropped to 22.46 per cent on the day from the previous day's rate of 23.45 per cent.
On the other hand, a total of 13,990 people recovered from the coronavirus disease in the country during the last 24hours, said the DGHS in its press release.
The rate of recovery was 90.35 per cent on the day while the rate of fatalities from the coronavirus disease remained static at 1.69 per cent, it added.
According to the official data, the total number of Covid-19 cases crossed 1.39 million in Bangladesh. More than 1.26 million of them had recovered from the deadly disease.
So far nearly 8.31 million samples were tested since March last year.
