Staff Reporter Islamabad
A special plane of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) has airlifted another batch of two million doses of Sinovac vaccines from Beijing Capital International Airport to Pakistan to help health authorities prevent and control Covid-19 pandemic in the country, says a message received here from Beijing.
So far, 16.5 million doses of Sinovac and six million doses of Sinopharm have been transported from China to Pakistan, Qadir Bux Sangi, PIA Country Manager for China said on Tuesday.
Pakistan has been using mainly Chinese vaccines namely Sinopharm and Sinovac, although others are also available and so far around 20 million people have been vaccinated.
The government has run a massive vaccination drive across the country to achieve the target of providing 70 million doses of vaccines aimed at fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.
It may be mentioned that Pakistani health authorities had launched a nationwide vaccination drive with around a million doses of Sinopharm vaccine donated by China, starting with older people and frontline healthcare workers, in March.
The drive began with a focus on the oldest people in the community, generally over the age of 80 and worked its way down.
Initially, the government had to deal with vaccination hesitancy and a shortage of vaccine supplies and had limited shots for people aged 30 or over. Now it is available for the people aged over 18 years.
Islamabad received the first COVID-19 vaccine consignment after a military aircraft transported it from Beijing on February 01, this year.
