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Covid-19 vaccination across Bangladesh to start from Feb 7

Published at 04:39 pm January 26th, 2021

Beximco warehouse in Tongi stocked up with Covid-19 vaccine 25.01.2021

Officials inside the Beximco Pharma warehouse in Tongi, Gazipur, which is stocked with boxes of Covid-19 vaccine doses that arrived earlier in the morning on Monday, January 25, 2021 Syed Zakir Hossain/Dhaka Tribune

Registration for vaccines to start Wednesday

With seven million vaccine doses in stock and over 8,000 pandemic deaths recorded, the government is planning to start the Covid-19 vaccination program across Bangladesh from February 7.

Trial run of the vaccination drive will also begin at Kurmitola General Hospital at 3:30pm on Wednesday, with 25 people getting the first jabs.

Health Minister Zahid Maleque came up with the development on Tuesday after visiting the hospital.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is scheduled to inaugurate the vaccination drive on Wednesday. A nurse is supposed to receive the first jab there.

Soon after the inauguration, the vaccination app, Surokkha, and also the website, www.surokkha.gov.bd, will be launched, where people will be able to register for getting the vaccine.

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The nationwide vaccination program was scheduled to start after a dry run on 400-500 people in Dhaka and a week of observation.

The government has worked out the plan for national vaccination against Covid-19 with a target to give two doses of jabs to each of over 130 million people to eliminate the prevalence of the deadly virus.

As per the plan, a total of 138,247,000 people will be vaccinated in five stages.

Also Read - 5 million Covid-19 vaccine doses arrive in Dhaka

On Monday, five million doses of the vaccine, invented by AstraZeneca and Oxford University and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII), arrived in Dhaka via an Air India flight.

Five more batches – each containing five million vaccines – are scheduled to arrive in phases over five months.

India also gifted another two million vaccine doses to Bangladesh, which arrived on Thursday.

The vaccine doses — called AZD1222 under SII’s brand name Covishield — are stored in a warehouse of Beximco Pharma, which is the exclusive distributor of the vaccine, at Tongi for now.

Until Tuesday morning, Bangladesh recorded 8,055 deaths from Covid-19 -- after the first cases and fatality was