Sri Lanka expecting 1.4 million badly needed AstraZeneca vaccines — Health officials
COLOMBO: Sri Lanka will get 1.4 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses before the end of this month, health officials said Friday, signalling good news for hundreds of thousands waiting for a second shot.
Together with other South Asian nations, Sri Lanka stopped getting supplies of India-made AstraZeneca vaccines earlier this year, after New Delhi froze exports.
In Nepal, 1.4 million people have only had one dose. In Bangladesh 1.5 million people are in the same situation.
Colombo has been appealing for at least 600,000 AstraZeneca doses for people who got a first dose in February and March and were left waiting for their second.
The much-needed shipments will come from the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s Covax programme.
Two days ago, the nation of 21 million people briefly turned to using the Pfizer vaccine as the second dose for 2,171 people who received AstraZeneca as their first over four months ago.
However, the mix-and-match was suspended after just one day.
“The decision (to suspend) was taken as 1.4 million doses of AstraZeneca is expected to arrive in Sri Lanka by the third week of July,” said army chief Shavendra Silva, who heads Colombo’s virus response.
He did not say where the new shots were coming from, but health officials said the new supplies would come from Covax.
Almost 385,000 people have had two doses of the vaccine, but 600,000 others were left waiting.
Colombo has appealed to Western nations as well as Japan to donate any surplus AstraZeneca vaccines.
Sri Lanka is also aggressively rolling out an inoculation programme with the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine. Nearly a million have received both doses of Sinopharm while 1.5 million have received the first.
Some 14,000 people have had both doses of Russia’s Sputnik V with another 100,000 getting the first jab.
Nearly 15,000 have had their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.