ISLAMABAD: The government has achieved the target of vaccinating over 2.3 million citizens in a week and it has done the Covid-19 vaccinations at a rate of 332,877 doses per day during June 12-18. According to an official of Ministry of the National Health Services, Regulations, and Coordination, this is the highest vaccination figure so far in any week and the government was ready to set another record in the next week.

He said the government was making sincere efforts to ensure the availability of the COVID-19 vaccine at all vaccination centres. He added that so far 20 million citizens have been vaccinated as the government has secured sufficient doses in the month of June to ramp up the vaccination drive in the country of 220 million.

He said there has been hearsay that vaccine doses were short in the country and added that it was a global phenomenon and shortage of vaccine was the world over the issue. He said the vaccine situation would be improved after June 20 when more vaccines will reach Pakistan.

He said the government was in contact with local and provincial administrations to make up the shortfall. “We are locally making load balancing and redistribution to manage the situation across the country.”

The official made it clear that there was no harm if the second dose of vaccine was delayed with the duration of six to eight weeks instead of a routine three to four-week duration.

Meanwhile, a special consignment of Sinovac vaccine of 1.55 million doses arrived at Islamabad airport through a special PIA flight. This was part of the planned contracted quantity purchased from China, he added.

China, as time tested friend of Pakistan, has taken special measures to ensure an uninterrupted supply of vaccines to Pakistan. Another consignment of 2-3 million doses of Chinese vaccines will be reaching Pakistan next week followed by continued supply.

The measures were in place to transport these vaccines to all federating units according to their requirement. The government was also in the advanced stages of procuring at least one million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.