Bhutan’s Health Ministry has announced that 90% of all eligible adults have received their second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine in one week. The small south asian country has a population of 800,000, with many volunteering with the vaccination effort.
UNICEF has stated that this was “arguably the fastest vaccination campaign to be executed during a pandemic.”
In April, Bhutan grabbed headlines when its government said it had inoculated around the same percentage of eligible adults with the first dose in under two weeks after India donated 550,000 shots of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Bhutanese efforts were halted after India had to turn inwards due to the Delta variant, vying for help from other countries.
Bhutanese vaccination efforts are a clear example of what can be accomplished when global cooperation is established to combat the pandemic. The U.N-backed COVAX program delivered half a million doses of Moderna from The United States while 400,000 doses of AstraZeneca shots were delivered from Denmark, Croatia, and Bulgaria. These countries filled the void left by India, allowing Bhutan to protect its citizens from the pandemic.
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