The COVAX facility, the United Nations-backed international vaccine-sharing scheme, has been supplying vaccine doses to Nepal for the last three days.

Officials said that the vaccine is part of the 1.6 million doses the facility has committed to supply to the country in 2024.

“We received 46,000 doses on the first day,” said Abhiyan Gautam, chief of the immunisation section at the Family Welfare Division under the Department of Health Services. “Vaccine doses arrived yesterday and today too.”

The COVAX-supplied vaccine doses are Pfizer-BioNTech monovalent vaccines, including the children’s vaccine. The monovalent or single component is designed for the Omicron variant XBB.1.5 of SARS-CoV-2.

Officials said that the vaccine doses will be administered to the vulnerable groups, including pregnant women, those having compromised immunity, people suffering from chronic diseases and children having compromised immunity.

Officials say around 100,000 vaccine doses will be administered to children between five and 11 having compromised immunity, including those suffering from cancer, HIV and other chronic diseases.

They said that administration of vaccine doses is likely to start in the last week of July.

Last month, Nepal confirmed the spread of the Covid sub-lineages KP.1, KP.2, KP.3, and KP.4 in the country. All the sub-variants are offshoots of the Omicron variant, which is considered responsible for the surge in new Covid cases in the last few months.

Hospitals in Kathmandu had reported a surge in serious cases of Covid infection in April. Doctors attending to the infected patients had said that elderly people and those with underlying conditions were getting severe.

The COVAX facility supplied millions of doses of various brands of the coronavirus vaccine which were used to inoculate the majority of the country's population.

Earlier, the facility used to supply Pfizer-BioNTech bivalent vaccine doses that included a component of the original virus strain as well as a part of the Omicron variant to provide broad protection against Covid.

The vaccine is called a bivalent Covid shot as it contains two components—the original virus strain, and Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants.

Over 12,000 people died and hundreds of thousands were infected in the first, second and third waves of the Covid pandemic in Nepal.