Bangladesh receives new shipment of 5.4m Sinopharm COVID vaccines

A new shipment of 5.4 million doses of China’s Sinopharm coronavirus vaccine has arrived in Bangladesh.

A Biman Bangladesh Airlines flight carrying the vaccine landed at Dhaka's Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport around 12:45 am on Saturday.

Health officials received the vaccines and later sent them to storage, airport health officer Sajjad Hossain told bdnews24.com.

Bangladesh has received close to 20 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine so far. The government has agreed to buy 30 million doses of the Chinese vaccine to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

The country is also receiving additional Sinopharm doses under the global vaccine-sharing platform COVAX.

The government started a mass vaccination campaign in February, using the COVISHIELD vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and Anglo-Swedish company AstraZeneca. But the programme was subsequently halted after India banned vaccine exports to tackle a growing COVID crisis within its own borders.

In addition to Oxford-AstraZeneca, the government has administered the Sinopharm, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.