Thimpu:
Bhutan has inoculated most of its eligible population with second doses of Covid-19 vaccinations in a week, in a speedy rollout hailed by UNICEF on Monday as a “success story” for international donations.
More than 454,000 shots had been administered more than the previous week in the remote Himalayan kingdom — just more than 85 % of the eligible adult population of more than 530,000 people today — soon after a current flood of foreign donations.
UNICEF’s Bhutan representative, Will Parks, hailed the ambitious vaccination drive as a “great success story for Bhutan”.
“We really need a world in which the countries which have surplus vaccines really do donate to those countries that haven’t received (shots) so far,” he told AFP in the capital Thimpu.
“And if there’s anything that I hope the world that can learn, is that a country like Bhutan with very few doctors, very few nurses but a really committed king and leadership in the government mobilising society — it’s not impossible to vaccinate the whole country.”
The tiny nation had swiftly utilised up most of the 550,000 AstraZeneca jabs donated by India in late March and early April for very first jabs, ahead of the neighbouring nation halted exports more than a enormous nearby surge in infections.
Faced with a increasing time gap among very first and second doses, Bhutan launched an appeal for donations.
Half a million Moderna doses donated by the United States by way of Covax — the distributor backed by the World Health Organization and the Gavi vaccine alliance — and yet another 250,000 AstraZeneca shots from Denmark arrived in mid-July.
More than 400,000 AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Sinopharm shots are also anticipated to arrive in the South Asian nation of 770,000 people today from Croatia, Bulgaria, China and quite a few other nations.
The government has meanwhile purchased 200,000 Pfizer doses that are anticipated to be delivered later this year.
Bhutan, wedged among India and China and popular for measuring gross national happiness, has reported just below 2,500 Covid-19 infections and two deaths so far.
The country’s fast roll-out of jabs stands in contrast with other South Asian nations, which have also been hit by India’s suspension of vaccine exports.
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