A large number of people staged protest at Lahore’s Expo Center COVID-19 vaccination facility over shortage of AstraZeneca vaccine.
Overseas Pakistanis seeking to travel abroad, engaged in heated arguments with administration staff at Lahore Expo Center after they were refused AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
People fear that passports and work permits are expiring and that they risk losing their jobs abroad as most of the countries are only accepting Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.
The development comes as Karachi and Lahore have reported severe vaccine shortage in the past few days primarily due to increased demand and issues with domestic distribution mechanism.
Last week, it was reported that only four vaccination centers in Lahore namely Pakistan Kidney and Liver Institute, Expo Centre, Minar-e-Pakistan, and Railway Dispensary were operational, whereas the rest were unable to carryout COVID-19 vaccination after running out of vaccine stock.
Meanwhile COVID-19 vaccine shipment under WHO’s COVAX programme scheduled to reach Pakistan in June this month, has also been delayed.
The vaccine consignment will now reach Pakistan by early July next month.
Pakistan has previously received two consignments of COVID-19 vaccine under COVAX programme, with first and second batch being received on May 8th and May 28th last month respectively.
Pakistan is facing an acute shortage of COVID-19 vaccines due to interruptions in international supply chain and issues with domestic distribution network. The situation has further been exacerbated by an exponential increase in vaccine demand as people have flocked to vaccination centers across the country in recent days.
However, government has reassured that Pakistan will receive millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses by the end of current month which will significantly stabilize vaccine availability across the country.
SAPM on Health – Dr Faisal Sultan had announced that Pakistan will receive 1.55 million COVID-19 vaccine doses by June 20th, another 2.5 million doses by June 22nd and further two to three million COVID-19 vaccine doses between June 23rd to 30th along with 400,000 locally made PakVac (Cansino) COVID-19 vaccine doses during this time period.
Currently, a total of six COVID-19 vaccines namely Sinopharm, CansinoBio, Sputnik V, Oxford AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Sinovac are being used to carryout nation-wide inoculation drive against the novel virus.
As per NCOC statistics, 6,945,344 people have been partially vaccinated against COVID-19 with 3,457,578 people being fully vaccinated against the novel virus with the country administering a total of 12,977,740 COVID-19 vaccine doses in total.
