ISLAMABAD: A special Pakistan Air Force (PAF) plane has returned from China with the first batch of COVID-19 vaccines which were pledged by Beijing to Islamabad recently, Pakistan’s health chief confirmed in a tweet on Monday.
“Grateful to China and everyone who made this happen. NCOC & provinces played an instrumental role in tackling COVID,” Dr. Faisal Sultan, Special Assistant to Prime Minister on National Health Services, said.
“I salute our frontline health care workers for their efforts & they’ll be first to get vaccinated,” Sultan added.
The move follows a Jan. 21 phone call between Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, wherein the latter announced Beijing’s initiative to “gift” 500,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine to Pakistan as “aid.”
In a statement on Sunday, the National Command and Operation Center (NCOC), which oversees Pakistan’s coronavirus response, said that the necessary steps had been taken to store the vaccine in Islamabad.
“All necessary measures have been put in place for vaccine storage at Islamabad and move of vaccine to various federating units particularly to Sindh and Balochistan through the air,” it added.
The NCOC has also set up a vaccine nerve center “with the provincial and district level vaccine administration and coordination and adult vaccination centers.”
China’s foreign ministry added that the vaccines would be sent in batches before directing Chinese firms to expedite the export process to Pakistan.
Earlier this month, Pakistani regulators approved two vaccines – by China’s Sinopharm and Oxford-AstraZeneca – for emergency use.
On Saturday, Planning Minister Asad Umar said that Pakistan would receive nearly 17 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the next six months.
Announcing the “good news” on Twitter, Umar said that he had received the intimation from the World Health Organization’s Covax forum which ensures equal distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries.
As of Monday, the national tally stood at 546,428 cases with 1,615 new infections and 26 deaths reported in the past 24 hours, according to government data.
