ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has completed registering 300,000 frontline workers for coronavirus vaccination, Planning Minister Asad Umar said on Sunday.
The National Command and Operation Center (NCOC), the federal government’s central body dealing with the pandemic, defines frontline workers as all staff at public and private COVID-19 hospitals and isolation centers, including clerical, administrative and sanitary workers and guards in addition to doctors, nurses and paramedics.
"About 300,000 healthcare workers have been registered so far,” the minister, who also chairs the NCOC, said in a Twitter post by the ministry.
ہمارے ہیلتھ کئیر ورکرز کی ریجسٹریشن کا کام بھی مکمل ہو چکا ہے، تقریباً 3 لاکھ ہیلتھ کئیر ورکرز اب تک رجسٹر ہو چکے ہیں۔ وفاقی وزیر منصوبہ بندی و ترقی pic.twitter.com/gDiulCN4TJ
— M/o Planning Development & Special Initiatives (@PlanComPakistan) January 17, 2021
He added that health care workers deputed to inject the COVID-19 vaccine had already been trained in administering the jabs.
Pakistan is currently battling its second wave of the virus and recorded 2,521 new infections on Sunday, with 43 deaths, an increase from last week.
Last month, the government said it would purchase 1.2 million COVID-19 vaccine doses from China’s Sinopharm, which are expected to arrive in the first quarter of the year.
Another possible vaccine to enter the Pakistani market is developed by Chinese company CanSino, which clinical trials, according to Umar, are going to be completed in Pakistan by February.
"If clinical results would be adequate that vaccine too will be available by March,” he said.
Pakistan has also allowed the emergency use of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, the prime minister’s adviser on health, Dr. Faisal Sultan, confirmed to Arab News on Saturday.