Vaccine prioritisation to be major challenge for BD: US Official

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a United States federal agency, has offered its expertise in fixing priority of potential anti-COVID-19 vaccine recipients in Bangladesh, fearing the issue to emerge as a ‘major challenge’ in coming days.

CDC Country Director in Dhaka Dr Michael Friedman recently said that the countries like Bangladesh, which are not producing vaccines against Covid-19, might have to wait longer to get adequate quantum of vaccines.

“It would be difficult for Bangladesh to get more than one million of doses in first six months after any potential COVID vaccine would be available globally,” he said.

Therefore, he said, it is important to prepare the first round of vaccine-recipient list prioritising who deserve the first access to the vaccine as Bangladesh never carried out any adult immunisation programme despite its success in administering inoculates among children.

“Vaccination in children and adult is not the same,” Friedman said, adding the idea of vaccinating huge numbers of adults will be bit challenging.

He said healthcare workers should get the first vaccine doses and they could be followed by ‘essential security personnel’ and key policymakers.

“Our (CDC) role here is to help the government and policymakers in terms of this (vaccine distribution) process,” said the US public health expert.

Friedman said the world requires over 15 billion of Covid-19 vaccine doses, if entire global population, currently 7.8 billion, need to get at least two round doses of vaccine.

Referring to the three most promising potential COVID vaccines being developed by the US companies, he said their production capacities can cover less than 10 per cent of world population in the first six months after getting approval.

Advising all to be ‘realistic’ to get vaccine in a fast manner, the US public health expert feared that majority of the world population have to wait for a year to get vaccinated. “It could be more than a year,” he said.

He added Bangladesh can explore opportunities for more collaboration to produce vaccine to get enough vaccines amid global competition.

Lauding capacity and standard of Bangladesh pharmaceutical companies, Friedman, however, said producing vaccine has technical challenges and it takes time to build that capacity.

Bangladesh’s leading pharmaceutical company Beximco Pharma has already signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Serum Institute of India for priority delivery of 30 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to Bangladesh.

The US expert also suggested that Bangladesh might also looking for potential Russian and Chinese vaccines to make its most vulnerable population, as much as possible, immune to Covid-19.

The CDC has been working in Bangladesh for the last 50 years to strengthen the country’s capacity to detect emerging infectious diseases and provide training and other interventions to partners.

It has been maintaining collaboration with Institute of Epidemiology Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) of health ministry and International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) for enhancing global health security.