B'desh to administer 40mn doses of Covid vax every month from Jan

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Dhaka, Dec 30 (IANS) Bangladesh will administer 40 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines every month from January next year, a Minister has said.

"We are taking the initiative to give vaccines in every ward of the country starting next month. Hopefully, we will be able to meet our targets by next May-June," Zahid Maleque, Minister for Health and Family Welfare, was quoted as saying in a report of leading local news agency UNB.

Maleque said that Bangladesh has been praised by the world for tackling the Covid-19 pandemic.

On the spread of the new Omicron variant, the Minister warned that vaccines alone will not contain its surge.

"We have to follow the proper hygiene," he said a day after Bangladesh on Tuesday started administering Covid-19 vaccine booster shots in the backdrop of the rapid transmission of the new variant.

Frontliners and the elderly will be given priority for booster shots, Lokman Hossain Miah, senior secretary of Bangladesh's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare told journalists.

Bangladesh began the ovid-19 vaccination drive in January to contain the pandemic that had spread across the country.

The government subsequently halted administering the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine after India banned vaccine exports.

In June, the vaccination drive resumed in parts of the country with the China-donated Sinopharm vaccine.

Bangladesh's vaccination drive has already achieved a milestone of administering more than 100 million vaccine doses.

According to the figures released on Wednesday by the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), about 120 million vaccine doses have so far been administered.

The Unicef said on Wednesday that it had delivered over 100 million Covid-19 vaccines to Bangladesh since June 2021.

--IANS

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