Pakistan commences production of COVID vaccine, NA told

Pakistan has commenced local production of the coronavirus vaccine, the National Assembly (NA) was told on Friday.

As per details, Parliamentary Secretary for National Health Services Nausheen Hamid told the house during question hour that the first batch of CanSino vaccine is currently being manufactured at the National Institute of Health (NIH).

The vaccine will be available for administration to the people by the end of this month.

The Parliamentary Secretary said out of the total stock of vaccine doses imported, 91 percent were purchased by the government while the remaining nine percent were gifted by China.

Earlier, the National Institute of Health (NIH) authorities informed that the raw material for the vaccine’s production has been imported from China and the work on formulating and packing the vaccine has locally been started.

The NIH would be able to produce over 100,000 doses per day by the end of May, for which raw material has been imported from China on May 4th.

“Raw material enough to produce 120,000 doses of the CanSino Bio vaccine per day was imported to Pakistan,” the officials said. The NIH officials had earlier announced that Pakistan would start packaging the vaccine in May.

Chinese experts are also present in Islamabad to help in the preparation of vaccine, whereas the NIH had started the venture in collaboration with a Chinese company, it was learnt.