Pfizer vaccine for children aged 5-11 yrs arrives

Bangladesh on Saturday received its first consignment of Covid-19 vaccines for children.

Inoculation with the vaccines will begin in August.

The jabs – developed by Pfizer-BioNTech – are for kids aged 5-11 years, Dr Shamsul Haque, member secretary of the Covid-19 Vaccine Deployment Committee of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), told The Business Standard on Saturday.

He said, "Over 15 lakh Pfizer doses, specially made for children, reached Bangladesh this morning. We are set to receive a total of four crore vaccine doses in phases. Children will also be given two doses of the vaccine.''

Dr Shamsul Haque said that the vaccine will be given to children from August. These vaccines will first be administered at schools. Later vaccination will be expanded to the community stage, he added.

In November last year, the government provided Pfizer vaccine to school students aged 12-17 years. A total of 1.73 crore students received the first dose and 1.60 crore students got two doses. 

Bangladesh logs 3 deaths, 349 cases from Covid in 24hrs

Bangladesh reported three deaths and 349 cases from Covid-19 in the last 24 hours till 8 am Saturday with a positivity rate of 6.64% after testing 5,256 samples across the country.

Meanwhile, 763 Covid patients were cured in the last 24 hours taking the recovery rate to 96.84%. 

So far, 29,288 people have died and 2004,892 tested positive for the virus in Bangladesh since 2020.