Minister urges public to get vaccinated so that coronavirus-related restrictions can be removed
The government, in a ceremony held to mark another milestone in the vaccination drive, said on Wednesday that 10 million Pakistanis have been vaccinated against coronavirus across the country
According to Radio Pakistan, Federal Minister of Planning and Development Asad Umar, speaking on the occasion, said that there is still a “long way to go” as the government aims to vaccinate 70 million citizens by the end of 2021. The minster revealed that on a daily basis, 0.3 million to 0.35 million citizens were registering themselves for the Covid-19 vaccine.
Acknowledging the reduction in positivity ratio, the minister mentioned that the “threat is not over yet” as 3,000 citizens were still in critical condition across the country.
It is worth mentioning here that like other countries short on vaccine supply, Pakistan conducted its inoculation drive in phases, whereby the elderly and the frontline workers were the first ones to get vaccinated, while other age groups were gradually included across the past few months.
Alongside the vaccination drive, amid the lethal third wave, the government also imposed targeted lockdowns to stop the virus from spreading to other parts of the country, which started bearing fruit near the end of May as the positivity rate started declining.
Moreover, last week, Pakistan also launched the first locally-process vaccine. PakVac, as it has been named, is being processed by the National Institute of Health in Islamabad from the concentrate of the vaccine developed by China’s state-owned pharmaceutical firm Cansino.
While the clinical trials found the vaccine to be 65.7 percent effective in preventing symptomatic cases and 90.98 percent effective in preventing severe infection, in Pakistan the efficacy has been found to be 74.8 percent and 11 percent, respectively.
On Wednesday, the minister urged the public to get vaccinated, stressing that it was the only way to remove all coronavirus-related restrictions.
