A mass campaign for administering the Covid vaccine to all citizens above 18 years of age will begin in August at union parishad level across the country, according to an announcement of the government made on Tuesday.
‘We have made arrangements for starting a vaccination campaign at union levels on August 7,’ home minister Asaduzzaman Khan said in a press briefing after an inter-ministerial meeting on the Covid pandemic at the Bangladesh Secretariat in Dhaka.
The inoculation campaign will be conducted across the country engaging local government bodies and local leaders under the supervision of the armed forces, he said, adding that family members of all frontline workers will also be brought under vaccine coverage.
Health minister Zahid Maleque, who was present at the meeting, said people will get vaccines at the union-level vaccination centres showing their national identity cards.
The government is also considering opening vaccination centres at ward level across the country, he said.
Cabinet secretary Khandker Anwarul Islam said that the people having no national ID cards would be vaccinated as well through on-the-spot registration under a special arrangement at union level, according to Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha.
The government took the decision for the mass campaign as a record number of people completed their registration for receiving the vaccine on Tuesday.
In the 24 hours till 2:30pm Tuesday, 7.07 lakh more people registered across the country for Covid vaccination, taking the total number of registrants to about 1.32 crore since the launch of the inoculation campaign in February, according to DGHS sources.
Among the registrants, about 78 lakh people have received the first jab and over 43.1 lakh both doses while a total of about 1.21 crore doses have been administered across the country, according to the health agency.
Some 2,21,536 doses of vaccine were administered on Tuesday hitting a single-day record on inoculation.
In an effort to diversify the sources of Covid vaccine procurement, the Bangladesh government has so far approved seven vaccines — Indian Covishield, also known as Oxford-AstraZeneca, Moderna of the United States, Sinopharm and Coronavac/Sinovac of China, Sputnik V of Russia, Comirnaty of Pfizer of the United States and Janssen of Belgium.
As of Saturday, the country has received about 1.02 crore Indian Covishield vaccine doses, 2.45 lakh Oxford-AstraZeneca doses from Japan, 55 lakh Moderna doses and 1.06 lakh Pfizer doses from the US and 51 lakh doses of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine.
The government has a stock of about 90.6 lakh vaccine doses till Tuesday afternoon, according to DGHS documents.
The government earlier set a deadline to vaccinate 80 per cent of the country’s 170 million population by next year.
