Daily Times

BEIJING: A special fight of the Pakistan International Airlines transported a batch of 500,000 doses of SinoVac vaccine from the Beijing Capital International Airport to Islamabad on Sunday.

Last Sunday, a special flight had also transported a consignment of two million doses of SinoVac procured from China to fight the ongoing wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Pakistan, said Qadir Bux Sangi, PIA country manager for China.

Pakistan has so far received over 13 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines including Sinopharm, SinoVac and CanSino procured from China including others through COVAX programme. In a statement, China’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson said that China has always attached great importance to Pakistan’s demand for vaccines to help fight Covid-19 pandemic and carried out close cooperation with that country.

“Chinese vaccines manufacturers have cooperated with Pakistan in the development and production of vaccines from very beginning and will continue to export vaccines to Pakistan.” Pakistan and China are strategic cooperative partners, he said, adding that since the outbreak of Covid-19, Pakistan and China have worked together to help each other and achieve positive results.

It may be mentioned here that Pakistan’s health authorities had launched a nationwide vaccination drive with around a million doses of Sinopharm vaccine donated by China, starting with older people and frontline healthcare workers, in March. The drive began with a focus on the oldest people in the community, generally over the age of 80, and worked its way down.

Initially, the government had to deal with vaccination hesitancy and a shortage of vaccine supplies and had limited shots for people aged 30 or over. Islamabad received the first COVID-19 vaccine consignment after a military aircraft transported it from Beijing on February 1, 2021.