Pakistan to start vaccine drive on Wednesday, cover 300,000 health workers within three weeks

Islamabad: The Pakistani government is planning to vaccinate more than 300,000 frontline health care workers within the next three weeks, the prime minister’s special adviser on health said on Monday after a Pakistan military aircraft brought back the country’s first consignment of COVID-19 vaccines produced by China’s Sinopharm.
The official rollout of the vaccine campaign will start this week on Wednesday, February 3, Dr. Faisal Sultan told Arab News.
“The process will take two to three weeks for this phase,” he said.
The South Asian nation of 220 million has already registered over 300,000 frontline health workers through a digital system. They will be vaccinated in the first phase of the vaccine campaign, followed by elderly people, over 65 years of age, who will be vaccinated in the second phase, after which the vaccine would be made available to the public.
The government is expected to receive another tranche of 1.2 million doses that Pakistan has pre-booked from China. Pakistan has also secured 17 million doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine under a global scheme to deliver coronavirus treatments to developing nations, Sultan said in an official statement last week.
About 6 million doses will arrive in Pakistan in the first quarter of 2021 under the COVAX scheme, with the remaining due by mid-year. The country last year signed up for the vaccine sharing scheme coordinated by the World Health Organization to support lower-income countries.
Pakistan is currently battling its second wave of the virus and recorded 1,615 new infections with 26 deaths in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of cases to 546,428 with 11,683 deaths since February last year when the first COVID-19 infection was reported in the country.
The health ministry has said all arrangements, including cold chain management, stock and smooth supply of the vaccine, are in place and would be monitored from Islamabad through a National Immunization Management System. The ministry will maintain a record of the number of vaccine doses delivered and utilized in each province and district, as well as the number of people vaccinated.