COVID-19: Balochistan receives only 1,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine from Imran Khan govt
Jun 15, 2021
Balochistan [Pakistan], June 15 : Balochistan, which has a population of over 1.23 crore, has been provided with only about 1,000 doses of COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine by the Imran Khan government.
The National Command and Operation Centre said that vaccine doses will be administered to people having extremely weak immunity, Dawn reported.
Balochistan Secretary of Primary and Secondary Health Care Aziz Ahmad Jamali confirmed that the provincial government had received 1000 doses of Pfizer vaccines from the NCOC.
The vaccine would be administered to only those people who have very weak immune systems at Civil Hospital Quetta, BMC Hospital, Fatima Jinnah Hospital and Centre Hospital.
"The Pfizer vaccine would be administered to patients of cancer, dialysis, kidney transplant, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and chronic hepatitis," Jamali said.
He advised such patients to submit their documents required for the Pfizer vaccine along with a doctor's prescription, a photocopy of laboratory tests, X-ray reports.
Balochistan is a resource-rich but least developed province of Pakistan where a movement for freedom has been ongoing for the past several decades.
Many Balochs believe that the region was independent before 1947 and was forcibly occupied by Pakistan.
Pakistan has received 14.5 million coronavirus vaccine doses since it began its vaccination campaign in February, the country's health ministry has said.
Pakistan has received the first batch of over 100,000 jabs of the Pfizer vaccine under the COVAX facility. It started distributing vaccine doses among provinces
There are 1,876 vaccination centers in the country, which the government aims to increase to 4,000.
Providing a province-wise breakdown of the distribution, the Pakistan government said Punjab will receive 26,000 doses of the mRNA vaccine while Sindh will get 12,000 doses.
He said Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has been sent 8,000 doses. Meanwhile, Balochistan has received only 1,000 doses.
The South Asian country has so far approved the emergency use of five vaccines -- China's Sinopharm, CanSino, and Sinovac, the UK's AstraZeneca and Russia's Sputnik.
It has also started locally producing the CanSino vaccine with the help of China.
As of June 13, Pakistan, which has a total population of 207 million, has administered 11,085,787 COVID-19 vaccine doses only.
Pakistanis have been wary of vaccines for many years -- long before the world knew the word coronavirus. Many here believe vaccinations in general are part of a government plan to either render people infertile for the purposes of population control, or a CIA conspiracy to microchip and monitor civilians.
