Diplomatic Correspondent: Bangladesh received another 616,780 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from Japan under the global COVID-19 vaccine-sharing initiative COVAX.
It is the third such shipment sent from the East Asian country.
A Cathay Airways jet carrying the vaccines arrived at Dhaka’s Shahjalal International Airport at 3:15pm on Tuesday, the Japanese Embassy in Dhaka said in a statement.
Japan has now sent a total of 1,643,300 jabs to Bangladesh under the COVAX facility to replenish the South Asian country`s vaccine stocks. The island nation is planning to send another 1.4 million doses this month, according to officials.
Japanese Ambassador in Dhaka Ito Naoki handed over the vaccines to Syed Mojibul Huq, Additional Secretary to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
“We`ll provide Bangladesh three million doses of vaccine. We`re wholeheartedly trying to dispatch the rest of the vaccines within this month,” said Naoki.
Bangladesh began its mass COVID vaccination drive with AstraZeneca shots from the Serum Institute of India in February.
Bangladesh reached an agreement with the organisation for the purchase of 30 million doses, but, after the first 7 million doses arrived, India halted exports as it struggled to deal with the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus. The Indian government had also sent 3.2 million doses as gifts before shipments were cut off.