Pakistan has received its first batch of a Covid-19 vaccine, 500,000 doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccine, as a gift, which landed in the country yesterday after being airlifted by the Pakistan Air Force from Beijing. The government has rightly decided that this first batch will be administered to frontline healthcare workers as not only do they have to take care of sick patients, their risk to exposure is the highest. However, the next stage of the inoculation exercise where the general population starting with the eldest (age 65+) and so on, will be the most important as its logistics are quite complex. Currently, the only suitable storage facility for the Covid-19 vaccine is in Islamabad and therefore anyone not living in the capital will either have to make a trip there or the government will have to take the vaccine to them. The former will be difficult for those living in the more far flung areas of the country, the latter requires a cold chain to be maintained throughout the journey, which is easier said than done and any break in that chain would waste the vaccine as its efficacy would be compromised.
According to Minister for Planning and Development Asad Umar the World Health Organisation’s Covax platform has sent a letter to the government ‘indicating’ supply of up to 17 million doses of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine in the first half of 2021, 6 million of which could be received as early as the end of this month. This is a commendable achievement as the government had timely signed on with Covax nearly eight months back to ensure availability. However, there is a lot that has to happen between procurement and administration of the vaccine. The government has claimed that it has set up a registration model through which citizens can get in line for the jab. However, if certain reports are to be believed, so far, there is no infrastructure in place whereby anyone can be registered and verified, let alone the provision of facilities where the dose would be administered. One hopes that this is not the case and the government is fully prepared to undertake this mammoth task of vaccinating an entire nation in order to get back to normal, albeit a new normal.
