Govt won’t provide any commission in COVID-19 vaccine procurement: Health Minister Tripathi
KATHMANDU, Mar 13: Minister for Health and Population (MoHP), Hridayesh Tripathi said that no commission will be provided while purchasing COVID-19 vaccines.
KATHMANDU, December 28: The government has halted COVID-19 vaccination drive for children aged between 12 to 17 years old due to shortage of syringe in the country.
Earlier, the government had announced to inoculate COVID-19 vaccine to children of eight districts including Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Lalitpur from today.
The vaccination drive will soon begin once the syringe shortage is resolved, according to the Health Ministry.
The government has already begun administering Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to children of 57 districts a week ago.
KATHMANDU, November 22: The government has started providing COVID-19 vaccine to all people above 18 years of age. Prior to this, the vaccination campaign was focused on the target groups, but now it is available for al.
Joint Spokesperson at the Ministry of Health and Population, Dr Samir Kumar Adhikari said the government has decided to provide vaccines to all above 18 as the supplies are regular.
He urged all the eligible people who were missed in the previous vaccination campaigns to visit the nearby vaccinations centers and get the shot. The government has a target of vaccinating one-third of the population by coming mid-January and 21.07 million by coming mid-April.
To date, 30 percent of the total population has been given the first dose of vaccine while the population receiving the full-course is 26 percent. Kathmandu District Health Office Chief Shambhu Kafley said the vaccine is available at five centers: Birendra Military Hospital, Nepal police Hospital, Shahid Memorial Hospital, Kalanki; Bayodha Hospital, Balkhu; at Lhotse Building in New Buspark, Gongabu; and the Herbs Processing Center, Jadibuti in Kathmandu. ---
Morocco will start administering booster COVID-19 vaccine shots in the coming days, as part of the national immunization campaign, the Ministry of Health announced Friday.
DHAKA, Sept. 19 : Bangladesh on Saturday received another 5 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine developed by China's pharmaceutical Sinopharm Group.
A plane of Biman Bangladesh Airlines carrying the Chinese vaccine doses landed at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport at around 2:00 a.m. local time Saturday, Health Ministry spokesman Maidul Islam Prodhan told reporters.
Abu Zaher, chief health coordinator at Bangladesh's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, received the consignment at the airport.
Earlier on Sept. 11, 5.4 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine arrived in Dhaka from China.
Bangladesh's vaccination drive is now running smoothly in the capital Dhaka and elsewhere largely thanks to China's continued vaccine support.
To fight the alarming spike in COVID-19 cases, Bangladesh has signed an agreement on the co-production of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine doses locally.
Bangladesh began the COVID-19 vaccination drive in January to contain the pandemic that has spread across the country.
The Bangladeshi 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 has so far received around 25 million Sinopharm vaccine doses from China.
KATHMANDU, August 21: Over 4.8 million people were inoculated with the COVID-19 vaccines since President of Nepali Congress, Sher Bahadur Deuba became the Prime Minister of Nepal, according to the Ministry of Health and Population.
As of Thursday, as many as 4,811,733 people have received COVID-19 vaccine in the country since the takeover of the government by PM Deuba.
Prior to this as many as 3.6 million people were vaccinated against COVID-19. With this, the number of people receiving the vaccines against COVID-19 has reached 8,520,421, according to the health ministry. Nepal is currently administering COVID-19 vaccine to 150,000 people in a day on average.
Of 8,520,421 people, 494,523 have received their both doses of COVID-19 vaccine which accounts for 13 percent of the total population of the country. While 16.8 percent of the total population have received their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Before Deuba's tenure, only 3.9 percent of the population had received both doses of COVID-19 vaccine while the percent of people receiving their second doses was 9.1 percent.
The number of people receiving COVID-19 vaccines has almost doubled in the past five weeks. The government has projected to administer COVID-19 vaccine to 33 percent of the total population by mid-October and vaccinate all the eligible population by mid-April next year.
Japanese-made AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine arrived in Kathmandu
KATHMANDU, Aug 7: The Japanese-made AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine arrived in Kathmandu on Saturday.
Ambassador of Japan to Nepal, Kikuta Yutaka attended the hand-over ceremony at the Tribhuvan International Airport with State Minister of Health and Population Umesh Shrestha, Joint Secretary of North East Asia Division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lok Bahadur Thapa, Representative of UNICEF Nepal, Elke Wisch and WHO Representative to Nepal, Dr Rajesh Sambhajirao Pandav.
This vaccine donation from Japan for Nepal through the COVAX facility was announced by Motegi Toshimitsu, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Japan on 13 July. Remaining half of 1.6 million doses pledged by Japan will be shipped to Kathmandu shortly,according to the Embassy of Japan in Nepal.
Taipei [Taiwan], July 9 : Taiwan has received a shipment of 1.13 million AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine doses donated by Japan on Thursday.
The vaccine doses were developed by the British-Swedish biotech company AstraZeneca and manufactured under license in Japan, Focus Taiwan reported. Health Minister Chen Shih-chung, at a press briefing, thanked Japan for the donation and said inspection of the vaccine shipment will be expedited to allow for faster distribution.
Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said Tuesday that the vaccine donations were a gesture of gratitude for Taiwan's aid to Japan in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit his country in 2011.
Motegi said he hopes the vaccines will help curb the spread of the virus in Taiwan, where daily confirmed cases have gradually flattened but a high alert for COVID-19 remains in place due to sporadic cases of the highly infectious Delta variant of the virus.
On June 4, Japan had donated 1.24 million doses of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine doses to Taiwan.
The donations come as Japan and Taiwan are strengthening ties, while their relations with Beijing are deteriorating.
Meanwhile, China has accused Taiwan's governing party of preventing the mainland from sending vaccines to Taiwan and falsely claiming that China has hindered its procurement of vaccines.
China has also lambasted Japan for having donated COVID-19 vaccine to Taiwan, labelling such a move as a "political performance". Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin had responded sharply when Tokyo said it is considering sending vaccines to Taipei in late May.
"We are firmly against those who exploit the pandemic to put on political shows or even meddle in China's internal affairs," he had said. "I have noticed that Japan can barely ensure adequate supply of vaccines at home."
"I would like to stress that vaccine assistance should be restored to its original purpose, which is to save lives, and should not be reduced to a tool for selfish political gains," he had added.
Taiwan's inoculation program has been on the slow side with President Tsai Ing-Wen's government facing flak over the unavailability of the vaccines.
Taiwan still has not received the ten million AstraZeneca vaccines it ordered between September 2020 and February 2021. In January, Taiwan agreed to purchase five million doses of BioNTech-Pfizer vaccines directly from BioNTech. The deal has remained unfulfilled.
President Tsai Ing-Wen, who handily won re-election last year, accused China of interfering with Taiwan's vaccine procurement to purposely cause delays.
"We were almost finished with the contract with the German supplier, but owing to China's interference, it's been delayed so that until now we have no way to complete it," she told members of her Democratic Progressive Party.
Health Minister Chen Shih-Chung later said that BioNTech had asked Taiwan to change the word "country" in the press release announcing the deal. Taiwan agreed, but the deal still remains unfinished.
To date, 60 per cent of the vaccines in Taiwan are donations from the governments of Japan and the US.
