DHAKA – Bangladesh has scrapped its mass Covid-19 inoculation drive due to a shortage of jabs, officials announced yesterday.
“We aren’t going to continue the mass vaccination campaign as we don’t have enough jabs on our hands. And we won’t conduct or use the term ‘mass vaccination’ drive, anymore,” the Anadolu Agency reported Health Minister Zahid Maleque as telling reporters in the capital here following a cabinet meeting.
Maleque added that registration to get vaccinated will continue in the South Asian country “depending on the availability of vaccines as we don’t want to see long queues at vaccination centres”.
More than 35 million people have registered for vaccines, while over 20 million citizens have been inoculated, he said.
The government had previously launched a six-day mass inoculation drive starting August 7 and was expected to extend it further.
Long queues stretched from vaccination centres across the country amid the low availability of vaccines, with many criticising that the lines violated health safety guidelines against the coronavirus.
Maleque had previously said on August 15 that the mass vaccination drive could not continue due to the dwindling number of doses.
It also reported that Bangladesh is expected to get six million more doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine as a gift next month, the minister added, saying that the country has also ordered more 60 million shots of Chinese vaccines while the country will receive 60.8 million doses under the Covax facility.
“There will be no vaccine crisis in the country soon, and some 70 to 80 million citizens will be vaccinated between January and February in 2022,” he said.
Bangladesh reported 117 more Covid-19 related deaths and 5,717 new cases yesterday, bringing the country’s death toll to 25,399 and the total number of confirmed infections to more than 1.46 million, according to official figures. – Bernama, August 24, 2021.
