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Bangladesh receives first Pfizer-BioNTech COVID shots under COVAX
A consignment of 100,620 Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 doses has arrived in Dhaka, the first under the international vaccine-sharing platform COVAX.
Published : 31 May 2021, 08:01 PM
Updated : 31 May 2021, 08:01 PM
A Qatar Airways jet flew the Pfizer shots under the World Health Organization-led programme landed to Shahjalal International Airport after 11:15pm on Monday.
Md Shamsul Haque, a line director at the Directorate General of Health Services or DGHS, said the doses would be kept at the designated ultra-cold storages of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation.
It is the third vaccine Bangladesh is using in its inoculation drive against the coronavirus.
The country has administered around 10 million doses of the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine.
A drive to administer over 1 million Sinopharm shots as gift from China is going on.
A committee will determine who will get the Pfizer jabs. The US drugmaker developed the shot by using the messenger RNA or mRNA technology of German biotechnological firm BioNTech.
In December last year, the United Kingdom approved the emergency administration of Pfizer vaccine as the first country. The WHO approved the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use in December as well.
A handful of countries including the United States and Canada are carrying out inoculation by using this vaccine on people as young as 12 years old.
Like the Oxford University-AstraZeneca COVID vaccine and the one developed by Chinese state pharmaceutical company Sinopharm, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine requires two shots with the second one to follow three to four weeks after the first.
The developers of the drug claim that its efficacy has proven to be 95 percent in the final stage of the trials.
Despite the high efficacy rate, Bangladesh had initially showed little interest in buying the Pfizer vaccine considering the complexities related to store, transport and distribute the shots that require to be stored in a frozen state at -90 degrees Celsius to -60 degrees Celsius.
Finally it approved the vaccine last week after COVAX agreed to send the doses.
Officials said Bangladesh has the capacity to store 200,000 doses of the vaccine.
But the distribution must take place in Dhaka where the facilities with ultra-cold refrigerators are available.
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