One million Covishield vaccine doses from India reaches

One million doses of the Covishield coronavirus vaccines reached Dhaka from India on Saturday.

The flight carrying the consignment landed at the Dhaka airport around 6 pm, a health ministry spokesperson told Dhaka Tribune.

Covishied has been developed by  the Serum Institute of India (SII)  in collaboration with Oxford University and AstraZeneca under technology transfer.

Earlier, the Indian government announced resumption of vaccine exports from October amid improvement of Covid-19 situation. 

The world's largest vaccine producer had halted exports in April to cater to domestic demand as infections shot up.

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Bangladesh entered into a deal with Serum to purchase 30 million doses of a potential vaccine developed by AstraZeneca.

Bangladesh was supposed to get five million doses of vaccine per month as SII and Bangladesh’s Beximco Pharma signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for priority delivery of the vaccine doses.

As of Saturday, Bangladesh has so far received only 8 million of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine doses produced by SII through its contract.

Bangladesh also received 3.3 million doses of the Covishield vaccine from India as a bilateral partnership gift.