Nepal on Thursday received 1 million doses of the China-made Vero Cell vaccine from China. The government received 1 million doses Vero Cell vaccine produced by the Beijing Institute of Biological Products out of the agreed 59.36 million doses to be purchased with the loan assistance from the Asian Development Bank through COVAX cost-sharing facility.
Earlier on Monday, the People’s Liberation Army of China had provided 300,000 doses of Vero Cell vaccine to the Nepal Army.
Before that, Nepal had received 1.6 million doses of Vero Cell on November 3 and 1.2 million doses of the same vaccine from China on October 27. The recently received vaccines are currently stored at the central storage center, Teku.
Nepal has purchased 10 million doses of Vero Cell vaccine through a non-disclosure agreement from China.
Similarly, Nepal on Wednesday received 492,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine provided by the Switzerland government under the COVAX facility. Of the total vaccines, 348,000 doses were provided under the COVAX facility, while the Switzerland government gifted 144,000 doses as grant assistance.
Nepal so far has received 22,571,810 doses of Covid-19 vaccines–Vero Cell, AstraZeneca, Janssen and Pfizer-BioNTech.
From India, the government purchased 2 million doses of Covishield whereas Nepal has purchased over 5.9 million doses of vaccine through COVAX’s cost-sharing mechanism. Of this, COVAX supplied 1.02 million doses of Vero Cell vaccine.
The United States on October 25 supplied 100,620 doses of Pfizer vaccine to Nepal. The vaccines were provided under the US commitment to COVAX.
