Bangladesh to buy Covid-19 vaccine through int’l tender

The government is going to float an international tender to procure Covid-19 vaccine, said a senior official of the Institute of Epidemiology Disease Control and Research (IEDCR).

Dr. ASM Alamgir, principal scientific officer of IEDCR, made the comment at a webinar on “How will we tackle the second wave of the pandemic?” organised by the Centre for Policy Dialogue.

Executive Director of CPD Dr Fahmida Khatun moderated the discussion attended by top business leaders.

“We are going for an open tender to buy Covid-19 vaccine. We’ll buy quality vaccines,” said Alamgir.

He said they have already contacted some vaccine makers, including Johnson and Johnson in the USA and Sinovac in China.

He hopes that India will withdraw the export ban on vaccines by this month and there will be no problem in getting the doses from Serum Institute of India.

Alamgir said Bangladesh has 700 cold chains across the country and it won’t be a problem to preserve the vaccine.

According to him, Bangladesh has the capacity to vaccinate 10 lakh people in a day

Bangladesh has so far got around one crore doses of Oxford’s AstraZeneca vaccine, he said