A consignment with around 54 lacs doses of Sinopharm’s Covid-19 vaccine arrived in Dhaka from China on early Saturday.
A regular flight of Biman Bangladesh Airlines landed at Dhaka’s Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport at 12:44 am with the vaccine consignment, Shahriar Sazzad, in-charge of the airport health camp, said.
‘Md Shamsul Haque, a line director at the Directorate General of Health Services, received the consignment at the airport,’ he told.
The consignment of vaccine doses is part of the commercial purchase from China. This is so far the second-largest batch of vaccine doses commercially purchased by Bangladesh from China.
The consignment is actually part of the commercial purchase from China, said deputy chief of mission at the Chinese embassy in Dhaka, Hualong Yan.
‘As a strategic partner of Bangladesh, China will always remain the most reliable supplier whatever and whenever the country needs,’ Hualong said.
With the new doses, China will have supplied over two crore doses of Sinopharm to Bangladesh commercially.
Another 2.4 million doses have also been received from China as bilateral assistance.
Bangladesh has so far received Sinopharm vaccine doses from China as a gift, under COVAX facility, and commercial purchase.
Prime minister Sheikh Hasina recently told Parliament that the government had made arrangements to get more than one crore Covid-19 jabs every month.
According to the schedule received from the company producing Sinopharm, two crore shots will be available every month from October and six crore from December, she added.
On August 16, Bangladesh, China and Incepta Vaccine Limited signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the coproduction of Sinopharm vaccine in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is now administering vaccines developed by four companies — AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Sinopharm.
