Mass Vaccination Gets Momentum: First month’s target may be revised

The health authorities are now thinking about revising the target of vaccinating 35 lakh people in the first month of mass inoculation against Covid-19.

They are considering the expansion of the vaccination target as more and more people are showing interest in taking the jabs, said health officials.

"People in their numbers are thronging the vaccination centres and we've no problem in vaccinating them. We've enough stock [of vaccine] in hand and are thinking about expanding the target," Prof ABM Khurshid Alam, director general of Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), told The Daily Star yesterday.

The government had initially planned to vaccinate 60 lakh people in the first month, but later revised the target to 35 lakh following a lukewarm response to the online registration.

The mass inoculation campaign began on February 7.

Since then, the number of people showing up at the centres, especially those in Dhaka, to take the first dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has increased every day.

Till Thursday night, around 5.5 lakh people had been given the shots and the number of those who did the registration on www.surokkha.gov.bd reached around 14 lakh.

The centres remained closed yesterday since it was a Friday.

Officials at several key vaccination centres in the capital said they had administered almost all the doses which they received.

Progressing slowly ahead of the campaign, the registration gained momentum after the government announced that people aged 40 and above could also register for the vaccination, they said.

The authorities also introduced on-spot registration and inoculation, but have stopped it later after receiving a good response to the online registration, they added.

The government launched the vaccination campaign with 70 lakh doses in hand. It is expected to get the second instalment of 50 lakh shots from Serum Institute of India (SII) later this month. Around the same time, another 1.31 lakh doses under the COVAX programme are scheduled to arrive here.

The government has purchased three crore doses of the vaccine from SII.

In Dhaka, several vaccination centres, including those in Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU) and Kurmitola General Hospital, have almost completed administering their allocated doses, DGHS officials said.

"We will send additional shots from our existing stocks to the centres which need them. We have directed the centres to increase their capacity to vaccinate more people," Prof ABM Khurshid Alam said.

According to DGHS officials, the National Immunization Technical Committee (NITAC) would sit today evening to decide on the new target for the first month of the vaccination.

After the government lowered the minimum age ceiling to 40 from 55 for the vaccination, the number of people in its priority list has gone up. The government has also reduced the interval period between the administration of two doses to four weeks from eight.

A DGHS official, wishing not to be named, told this newspaper that the NITAC meeting today might also discuss whether the interval period could be increased.

AstraZeneca on Thursday said the key to the success of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is a longer gap between the two doses, reports The Telegraph newspaper of the UK.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) also recommended extending the time between the first and second dose to improve efficacy.

"In light of the observation that two-dose efficacy and immunogenicity increase with a longer inter-dose interval, WHO recommends an interval of eight to 12 weeks between the doses," it said.

There are 2,400 vaccination centres across Bangladesh and they have the capacity to inoculate 3.6 lakh people every day.

On the first day of the mass campaign, on February 7, some 31,000 people were given their first shot of the vaccine. More than two lakh people took the jabs on Thursday, which took the total number of vaccine recipients in the country to 5,42,309.

Of them 68,901 received the shots in 46 centres in Dhaka city, show DGHS data.

For Dhaka district and Dhaka city, the DGHS allocated six lakh vaccine jabs. Ahead of the campaign, the government had distributed 50 lakh doses among 61 districts

The rush for vaccine has resulted in many failing to find a date for taking the jabs even after they received confirmation of their registration.

More than nine lakh people were waiting to get vaccinated as of yesterday afternoon after completing the registration.

"We are observing that people have been rushing to some certain vaccination centres. As we allowed on-spot registration, there are backlogs in many centres. For this reason, many of those who registered are not getting their confirmation SMS. This will be solved soon," Dr Shamsul Haque Mridha, member secretary of the National Covid-19 Vaccination Campaign of the DGHS, told The Daily Star yesterday.

"There were several technical complexities people were reporting. Almost all of them have been fixed. The process is getting smoother every day contributing to the rising number of registrations," Md Toufiq Hassan Shawon, medical officer at the management information system (MIS) at the DGHS, told The Daily Star.