Senate Deputy Chairperson Saleem Mandviwalla on Thursday said that an order for 200,000 Covid-19 vaccine doses has been placed which will initially be administered to senators and the upper house's staff.

While talking to DawnNewsTV, Mandviwalla said he talked to Dr Faisal Sultan, the special assistant to the prime minister on health, to inquire why approvals were not being given to vaccines.

"I asked Dr Faisal Sultan why approval was not being given to vaccines. If the government is unable to decide and procure, the private sector [can] acquire it," he said, adding: "He said we have given approval and [the private sector] can procure" the vaccine.

Pakistan has so far approved three coronavirus vaccines — the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, the vaccine developed by Chinese state-owned firm China National Pharmaceutical Group (SinoPharm) and Russian-developed Sputnik V.

Commenting on the procedure which has to be followed by the government, Mandviwalla said today that "this is a life-saving drug right now."

"People are dying, they don't know where to go to get the vaccine [...] There is no need [to follow] PPRA (Public Procurement Regulatory Authority) rules, the prime minister can just exempt vaccine procurement from PPRA rules."

As a "first step taken through Senate", Mandviwalla said, an order has been placed through the Chinese foreign office and its embassy in Pakistan. He did not mention the name of the company from which the vaccine will be procured.

The announcement comes a day after Planning Minister Asad Umar announced that the first phase of the vaccination drive in Pakistan will begin from next week.

China has pledged to donate 500,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine made by the Chinese firm SinoPharm to Pakistan. The government expects China to donate a further million vaccine doses.

'Fully prepared'

Also on Thursday, a special session about Pakistan's vaccine strategy was held at the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) which was chaired by Dr Sultan and attended by provincial health ministers through video link.

The session deliberated on "efficient vaccine movement" to various federating units and its deployment mechanism, according to an NCOC statement.

It said a special plane will be flown to China in the next couple of days for transportation of the first tranche of vaccine to Pakistan.

During the meeting, the provinces updated the NCOC on their complete deployment plan and infrastructure arrangements for the administration of vaccine. The vaccine nerve centre has been established at the NCOC, while vaccine administration centres have been set up in the provinces and arrangements up to the district level have been made, the statement said.

"We are fully prepared for this undertaking and also united in this mission. Our coordinated efforts have brought us a long way," Dr Sultan was quoted as saying on the occassion.

The premier's aide had earlier said Pakistan could get “in the range of tens of millions” of vaccine doses under an agreement with China's Cansino Biologics Inc.

Cansino's Ad5-nCoV vaccine candidate is nearing completion of Phase III clinical trials in Pakistan, and preliminary results may be available by mid-February, Sultan said.

Dr Ghazna Khalid, a member of the government task force on Covid-19, said Pakistan would procure vaccines from various markets.

“There's going to be an accumulation of vaccines, a consortium available, there's going to be Chinese vaccines, there's going to be AstraZeneca,” she said.

“We are the fifth biggest country in the world, and it's going to be very difficult to immunise.”

Meanwhile, the availability of free-of-cost Covid-19 vaccine seems to have been assured for Pakistan as Covax announced earlier this month that it will acquire 150 million doses in the first quarter and two billion doses by the end of the year.

It further said that, out of the two billion doses, 1.3bn will be provided to 92 lower-income economies. As a result of this agreement, the chances of Pakistan getting the free doses in the first quarter of the current year seem to have brightened.

With additional reporting by Naveed Siddiqui in Islamabad.