Citizens aged above 60 will get the fourth dose of Covid-19 vaccine, Health Minister ZahidMaleque has said.
Talking to reporters on Monday, he said the decision got approval from Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
“Aged persons can take the 4th dose during the ongoing seven-day campaign from any centre,” he said.
The seven-day special campaign for vaccination against Covid-19 was launched on December 1. Around 90 lakh people will be vaccinated under this campaign where 17,116 teams will provide the service.
The minister said around 98 percent of the adult people received vaccines against the Covid-19 in Bangladesh. Besides, students are also being administered with the vaccine.
So far, 14 crore people have been vaccinated with the first dose while more than 12 crore people with the second dose and six crore with the booster dose against Covid-19.
Earlier, the National Technical Advisory Committee (NTAC) on Covid-19 recommended administering the fourth dose of Covid vaccine to contain the further spread of the virus.
It recommended bringing front liners, citizens aged above 60 and pregnant women under the fourth dose vaccination programme in the first phase.
The World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic three years ago. But it is still far from over.
Director-general Dr. TedrosAdhanomGhebreyesus said Friday that due to COVID-19 “more than 8,500 people lost their lives last week — which is not acceptable three years into the pandemic, when we have so many tools to prevent infections and save lives.”
He said last Saturday marked the anniversary of WHO’s announcement of COVID-19’s omicron variant, which he said “has proved to be significantly more transmissible than its predecessor, delta, and continues to cause significant mortality due to the intensity of transmission.”
The WHO chief said omicron has evolved and there are now “over 500 sub-lineages of omicron circulating” and all of them are “highly transmissible” and “have mutations that enable them to escape built-up immunity more easily.”
While WHO believes the world is “closer to being able to say that the emergency phase of the pandemic is over,” Tedros said, “we are not there yet,” despite WHO estimates that at least 90% of the world’s population has some form of COVID immunity, due to infection of vaccination.
Tedros warned that, “Gaps in surveillance, testing, sequencing and vaccination are continuing to create the perfect conditions for a new variant of concern to emerge that could cause significant mortality.”