Bulgaria sends 270,000 AstraZeneca COVID vaccine doses to Bangladesh

Bulgaria has sent 270,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine to Bangladesh to help contain the coronavirus pandemic.

The shipment arrived in Dhaka by a Turkish Airlines cargo flight on Wednesday, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

A representative of the Directorate General of Health Services received the vaccines at the airport.

Bangladesh launched its inoculation drive against COVID-19 in February by rolling out the vaccine Covishield, developed by the University of Oxford and Anglo-Swedish company AstraZeneca and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.

But India stopped exporting vaccines after sending 10.2 million doses, including 3.2 million as gift, as it faced a shortage amid a devastating wave of infections.

The government suspended administering the first dose of the vaccine by the end of April to preserve its stocks for the second dose. But more than 1.5 million people did not get the second shot on schedule due to the shortage.

The drive resumed in June after the arrival of Sinopharm vaccines from China.

Those who were yet to get the second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine finally received the shot after Japan began sending the vaccine by the end of July. The East Asian country has sent more than 3 million doses under the global sharing platform COVAX.

With the arrival of the shots from Bulgaria, Bangladesh has so far received about 13.53 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.