Shawdesh Desk:

One million more doses of the Covishield vaccine reached Dhaka from India on Saturday evening.

The vaccine doses, produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII), arrived at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport around 5:54pm, airport sources said.

This vaccine doses came to Dhaka under the commercial arrangement between SII and Beximco.

Earlier, the Indian government announced resumption of Covid vaccine exports from October amid improvement of COVID situation.

The world’s largest vaccine producer had halted exports in April to cater to domestic demand as infections shot up.

Bangladesh entered into a deal with the Serum Institute of India (SII) to purchase 30 million doses of a potential vaccine developed by AstraZeneca.

Bangladesh was supposed to get five million doses of vaccine per month as the SII and Bangladesh’s Beximco Pharma signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for priority delivery of the vaccine doses.

Bangladesh has so far received only 7 million of Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine doses produced by Serum Institute of India (SII) through its contract.

Bangladesh also received 3.3 million doses of vaccine as a bilateral partnership gift.