An additional 333,900 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine, provided by Japan, arrived in Nepal on Sunday.

This is part of the 1.6 million doses the Japan government has pledged under the COVAX facility, an international vaccine-sharing scheme backed by the United Nations.

“We received a second consignment of AstraZeneca vaccine from Japan today,” Dr Roshan Pokhrel, secretary at the Health Ministry, told the Post.

According to Upendra Dhungana, chief of the Logistic Management Section under the Department of Health Services, 333,900 doses of vaccine arrived on Sunday evening.

On Saturday, 513,420 doses of AstraZeneca arrived from Japan, on the heels of the arrival of 230,000 doses of the same type of vaccine from Bhutan a day before.

The government has already announced that it would start administering the vaccine to those 1.4 million people aged 65 and above who took their first doses of AstraZeneca vaccine in the second week of March starting Monday.

With the arrival of additional doses, Nepal so far has received 10,860,170 doses of vaccine from different sources.

Nepal started its vaccination drive in January with the 1 million doses of Covishield, the AstraZeneca type vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, which were gifted to Nepal by the India government.

Of the 2 million doses Nepal bought from the Serum Institute, only 1 million doses were shipped.

Nepal so far has used Covishield, Vero Cell, developed and manufactured by China’s Sinopharm, and Janssen by Johnson & Johnson to inoculate its population against Covid-19.

Of the 5.8 million doses of Vero Cell, 4 million doses Nepal bought from China while 1.8 million doses were provided by the Chinese government under grant assistance.

On July 12, the United States provided 1,534,850 doses of Janssen through the COVAX facility.

COVAX itself had supplied 348,000 doses of Covishield to Nepal on March 7.

The government has unveiled a plan to procure 42 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine by February next year, and inoculate all eligible citizens above 12 years of age before mid-April.

As of Sunday, 4,494,269 people have received their first doses (around 14.98 percent) and 2,492,182people have been fully vaccinated (around 8.3 percent).