Pakistan receives 15 million ADB-funded Covid vaccines

ISLAMABAD: The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has said that 15 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines arrived in Pakistan in December.

“ADB’s $500 million assistance is helping the country to procure about 75 million vaccine doses, safety boxes and syringes to vaccinate over 35 million people,” the ADB Pakistan chapter said on its official Twitter handle on Monday.

15 million more doses of ADB-funded COVID-19 vaccines arrived in #Pakistan during #December. ADB's $500 million assistance helping country procure about 75 million #vaccine doses, safety boxes & syringes to vaccinate over 35 million people.@eadgop @PakPMO @appcsocialmedia pic.twitter.com/yw1gVIG67W

— ADBPakistan (@PakistanADB) December 27, 2021

Earlier in the day, Federal Minister for Planning and Development Asad Umar revealed that the total number of Covid-19 vaccine shots administered in the country has crossed 15 crores.

Read more: Coronavirus booster vaccination of fully immunised people starts in K-P

In a statement on Twitter, the minister said that Punjab leads the way in provinces as 68 per cent of the eligible population has received at least one vaccine dose.

Some 57 per cent of people in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, 51 per cent in Sindh and 38 per cent in Balochistan have received Covid-19 vaccinations.

Umar, who also heads National Command and Operations Centre (NCOC), also felicitated Balochistan for doing a “great job in December” as the province witnessed a “sharp increase in vaccinations.”

On December 13, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Pakistan had confirmed the country’s first Omicron case.

“The NIH has been able to confirm (via whole genome sequencing) that a recently suspected sample from Karachi is indeed the ‘Omicron variant’ of SARS-CoV2,” NIH Pakistan had said in a tweet.