B'desh Extends Special Campaign To Administer First Covid Dose

Dhaka: The Bangladeshi government has decided to extend the ongoing special campaign to administer the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine by two days to February 28 amid a rising demand, Health Minister Zahid Maleque has said.

As part of its "relentless" efforts to rein in the coronavirus outbreak, the Bangladeshi government previously decided to hold a day-long countrywide mass vaccination campaign on Saturday targeting to vaccinate 10 million people with the first dose. Nearly 200 million doses of the Covid vaccine have been administered in the country.

According to a statement received on Friday night from the government's Management Information System of Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), 195,081,035 vaccine doses, including 102,115,689 Sinopharm vaccine doses, had been administered across Bangladesh as of Friday. Also in recent months, the number of Chinese Sinovac vaccine doses administered in Bangladesh has continued to rise significantly. The latest data showed 17,079,558 Sinovac doses have been inoculated in the country as of Friday.

Bangladesh has been using Covid vaccines developed by AstraZeneca, Sinopharm, Moderna, Pfizer, Sinovac, and Johnson and Johnson. Professor Meerjady Sabrina Flora, additional director general of Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), said that Saturday's vaccination efforts will continue as long as there are people eligible for inoculation. "We want to vaccinate every eligible person in the country," she said.

People from all walks of life, especially the less affluent section of the society, have made up the majority of the first dose vaccine recipients Saturday, and most of them received Sinovac vaccine doses. Bangladesh recorded 759 new confirmed cases of Covid and eight deaths on Saturday, bringing the total tally to 1,941,816 with 29,024 deaths, the DGHS said.

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