Nepal on Wednesday received 600,000 doses of Covishield, the AstraZeneca type vaccine, from the COVAX facility.

It is the third consignment and part of 6,039,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine committed by the facility, the international vaccine sharing scheme backed by the United Nations.

“We have received 600,000 doses of the Covishield vaccine from the COVAX facility,” Badebabu Thapa, a senior officer at the Logistic Management Section under the Department of Health Services, told the Post.

Earlier, on December 1, the facility had supplied 972,000 doses and before that 725,550 doses on November 29.

Nepal so far has received 25,649,840 of Covid-19 vaccines—Vero Cell, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Nepal launched its Covid-19 vaccination campaign on January 27 with 1 million doses of Covishield gifted by India.

Nepal needs to vaccinate around 78 percent of its over 30 million estimated population, or around 25 million people, as per the government’s new plan that includes those aged between 12 and 18 years. Earlier, the government had planned to vaccinate only those aged 15 years and above.

As of Wednesday, 8,869,067 people (29.2 percent of the total population) have been fully vaccinated.