Vaccination of Rohingyas begins on August 10
The government will begin vaccinating around 66,000 Rohingya refugees living in the camps of Cox's Bazar from August 10.
"We will begin the vaccination from August 10 unless natural calamity like heavy rains and landslide occur," Shah Rezwan Hayat, commissioner of the Refugee Rehabilitation and Repatriation Commissioner (RRRC), told The Daily Star yesterday.
"The refugees aged 55 and above, and the frontline workers in the camps will come under the vaccination programme."
The plan is to inoculate 66,000 initially, but eventually all Rohingyas refugees will be vaccinated in the camp in Cox's Bazar, where nearly a million have been living since the 2017 military crackdown on them in Myanmar's Rakhine state.
Those in Bhashanchar will also come under inoculation later. Currently, there are about 19,000 Rohingyas in Bhashanchar.
So far, 2,400 Rohingyas have reportedly contracted the Covid-19 infection. Of them, 28 have died, Hayat said.
The positivity rate of the infection among the refugees was 11 percent yesterday.
"There are adequate isolation centres and ICU facilities for them in Cox's Bazar."
The decision to vaccinate the Rohingyas comes six months after the country first began the vaccination programme on February 7 with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines.
The vaccination programme was halted for a few weeks as the supply of the vaccine from India had stopped. It restarted with the arrival of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines from the US and BBIBP-CorV from Sinopharm China.
The government aims to complete the vaccination of 60 lakh people in the country by August 7 to 14, and another one crore by the end of this month as Covid-19 infections are on the rise.
Comments