Pakistan has received 100,000 doses of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine through Covax – the World Health Organization’s global joint vaccination program – while deliveries of diluents and syringes will arrive today (Saturday) and tomorrow.
The announcement of the vaccine’s arrival was shared on Twitter by Unicef Pakistan, which also praised Pakistan for “the successful launch of the nationwide Covid-19 vaccination campaign, the excellent precautions in vaccination centers and the involvement of all over 18s”.
This is the second vaccine shipment that Pakistan has received through the Covax facility. The country received the first shipment earlier this month, which consisted of 1,238,400 doses of AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccines. Officials had said at the time that another 1,236,000 cans would be received in the coming days.
Pakistan is said to receive a total of 17.2 million cans through Covax.
So far, Pakistan has approved five Covid vaccines: Sinopharm, Cansino, Sinovac, Sputnik and AstraZeneca.
Earlier this week, the government announced that it had started production of China’s single-dose CanSino vaccine at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Islamabad.
A tweet from the official government report said that three million doses of the vaccine per month would be produced to “significantly reduce Pakistan’s reliance on imports of vaccines from other countries.”
An NIH official, who asked not to be named, said 120,000 doses of the CanSino Covid-19 vaccine had been packaged and hopefully an opening ceremony would be held by the end of this month.
“The first batch test trial, which included stability test, safety test, sterility test and spike protein test, has been completed. A total of 120,000 doses have been prepared and a tentative date for the opening ceremony is May 30,” the NIH official said.
The University of Health Sciences has also started work on protocols to begin trials for a nasal vaccine that would not require a syringe.
It is hoped that the clinical trial will begin in six to eight weeks of receiving the necessary approval.
On Wednesday, the government decided to open registration to anyone over the age of 18 with computerized national ID cards (CNICs) from May 28.
Around 39 million people should benefit from the decision, and almost 100 percent of the population who can be vaccinated have been able to register.
Cases across the country have now decreased, and Pakistan has reported fewer than 3,000 cases in the past five days. 2,455 new infections were detected on Saturday, while the positivity rate fell from 4.8 percent the day before to 4.4 percentage points.
Coronavirus deaths have also stayed below 100 in the past eight days.