DHAKA – Bangladesh held a special COVID-19 vaccination campaign on Tuesday, with nearly 6.8 million people inoculated in a single day, with China’s Sinopharm vaccine, setting a new record for the country.

Professor Meerjady Sabrina Flora, additional director general of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), under Bangladesh’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, said, “We arranged to give the same vaccine all over the country, so that there is no confusion in future. Sinopharm doses are being vaccinated under this campaign.”

According to the DGHS, 90.12 percent of the targeted 7.5 million citizens were given vaccines during the special campaign. The single-day inoculation number was a new record for the country.

She further said that the vaccination drive is one of many programmes marking the 75th birth anniversary of Bangladeshi Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina.

Md Yusuf Ali, a Dhaka dweller, was very happy to receive his first vaccine. “I’ve come to know that a vaccination campaign is going on here, on the occasion of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s birthday,” he said.

“So I received my first vaccine dose today,” he said, while many others were queuing up to receive theirs.

Doctor Minara Zaman, who works as a technical manager at the BRAC, a non-governmental development organisation, based in Bangladesh, said, they were running this vaccine centre, under the supervision of the BRAC, in collaboration with the Dhaka City Corporation and the Department of Health and Family Welfare.

Bangladesh so far received 55 million vaccine doses, including nearly 35 million doses of Sinopharm, 13.6 million doses of Oxford-Astrazeneca, 5.5 million doses of Moderna, and 1.1 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, according to local media.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK