Nepal received 492,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine on Wednesday provided by the Swiss government and the COVAX facility, an international vaccine-sharing program supported by the United Nations.

A Qatar Airways plane with the vaccine landed at Tribhuvan International Airport at 8:15 p.m.

“We received 492,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine from Switzerland,” Badebabu Thapa, a senior official in the health ministry’s logistics management division, told the Post.

Of the 492,000 cans, 348,000 cans were provided by the COVAX facility and the remaining 144,000 cans were donated by the Swiss government as part of grants, according to Thapa.

Nepal has received 22,571,810 doses of Covid-19 vaccines to date – Vero Cell, AstraZeneca, Janssen and Pfizer-BioNTech.

The previous Monday, the People’s Liberation Army of China had provided the Nepalese army with 300,000 doses of Vero Cell vaccine.

Nepal bought 10 million doses of Vero Cell vaccine through a nondisclosure agreement from China.

The government bought from India 2 million cans of Covishield, the AstraZeneca-type vaccine.

Regardless, the government has purchased over 5.9 million doses of the vaccine through COVAX’s cost-sharing mechanism. Of these, COVAX supplied 1.02 million doses of the Vero-Cell vaccine.

Another broadcast should arrive on Thursday.

The vaccine was purchased with a loan from the Asian Development Bank.

The government has also decided to buy 10 million doses of vaccine from US companies (4 million doses of Moderna vaccine and 6 million doses of Pfizer BioNTech vaccine).

Nepal has so far used the AstraZeneca vaccine made in India, Japan and Europe; Vero Cell developed by Sinopharm of China; and the single-shot Janssen from Johnson & Johnson in the US.

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

Nepal has to vaccinate around 78 percent of its 30 million people – or around 25 million people, as the government’s new plan, which includes people between 12 and 18 years of age, envisages. Previously, the government had planned to only vaccinate those from 15 years.

With around 4-5 million people said to live abroad, the government must vaccinate around 19-20 million people. To do this, the country needs a little more than 40 million doses of double vaccination.

As of Wednesday, 7,482,195 people (24.6 percent of the total population) had been fully vaccinated.