Nepal on Monday received over 3 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines—Vero Cell and Covishield from China and India respectively.

According to officials at the Ministry of Health and Population, they received 1,870,500 doses of Covishield, an AstraZeneca type vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, from the COVAX facility.

COVAX, which is a United Nations-backed international vaccine-sharing scheme, had also delivered 1,201,887 doses of the Vero Cell vaccine purchased under a cost-sharing scheme.

Earlier in the morning a Sichuan Airlines cargo plane carrying Vero Cell doses had to return to China after it failed to land at Kathmandu airport owing to poor visibility. The plane, which was scheduled to land at 7:15am, made a few attempts to land in Kathmandu before returning to China, airport officials said. But later in the afternoon, the cargo plane delivered the doses.

The Vero Cell doses are part of the over 5.9 million doses of the vaccine purchased through COVAX’s cost-sharing mechanism using a loan from the Asian Development Bank.

It is the third consignment to arrive in Kathmandu.

The first consignment of 1.02 million doses was supplied in October and the second consignment was supplied in November.

Officials said that the Covishield consignment is part of the 6 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine COVAX has committed to Nepal.

Nepal so far has received 34,267,477 doses of Covid-19 vaccines—Vero Cell, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Nepal needs to vaccinate around 78 percent of its over 30 million estimated population, or around 25 million people. Since 4-5 million Nepalis are said to be living abroad, the number of people who need to be vaccinated is estimated to be around 20 million.

So far, 9,646,720 people (31.8 percent of total estimated population) have been fully immunised.