Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: The National Command and Operation Center (NCOC) was informed Wednesday that the government was “in close liaison” with leading international manufacturers of coronavirus vaccines to secure early doses of the antidote.
The government earlier this month announced it had begun the vaccine procurement process. The government has approved $150 million in funding to buy the vaccines, initially to cover the most vulnerable 5 percent of the population. The amount was later increased to $250 million following a surge in the cases. The initial phase of vaccinations would focus on providing free shots for frontline health workers and people above the age of 65 years, Dr Faisal Sultan, the prime minister’s special adviser on health, had announced.
A panel of experts was compiling a list of recommendations on how to procure the vaccine, Dr Faisal said. “We will see whether we need to tap more than one source, including some Western manufacturers or some Chinese, so we will move forward with all these options.”
Pakistan has launched Phase III clinical trials for CanSino Biologics’ vaccine candidate, Ad5-nCoV, led by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and pharmaceutical company AJM Pharma the local representative of CanSino.
Another Chinese candidate, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has also developed a vaccine which was found to be safe and triggered immune responses in early and mid-stage trials. A late-stage trial of the ZF2001 vaccine began last month in China and aims to recruit 29,000 people from Pakistan among other countries.
Meanwhile, the government portal keeping track of the outbreak in Pakistan on Wednesday posted 2,142 new infections of the novel coronavirus after conducting 35,621 tests a positivity ratio of 6.01 per cent. Some 84 critical patients, 73 of whom were under treatment in hospitals and 11 quarantined in their residences, died of coronavirus-related complications. Of the total, 47 patients were on ventilators. Most of the deaths were reported from Punjab followed by Sindh.
During the last 24 hours, no ventilator was occupied in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) while 319 were put to use elsewhere. Multan emerged as the largest occupier of the artificial oxygen with 55 per cent usage, Islamabad 33 per cent, Peshawar 25 per cent and Lahore 34 per cent.
The oxygen chambers (a type of treatment used to speed up healing of infections in which tissues are starved for oxygen) were also occupied in four cities: Rawalpindi 41 percent, Abbottabad 35 per cent, Peshawar 60 per cent and Multan 39 per cent.
The number of recovered patients stood at 415,352 with the recovery rate surging to 86 percent. Since the outbreak in Pakistan, a total of 462,814 infections were confirmed including the perished, recovered and under treatment Covid-19 patients. The numbers are as following: Sindh 206,489 cases, Punjab 133,179, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) 55,811, Islamabad 36,483, Balochistan 17,980, AJK 8,040 and GB 4,832. A total of 6,406,281 tests have been conducted so far, while 615 hospitals have been fully equipped with coronavirus-related facilities.
