The government is scrambling to meet the rising demand for polio vaccine and immunisation certificates in the country in the wake of travel restrictions imposed by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The Punjab Health Department is expected to seek a relaxation in procurement rules to allow it to quickly purchase polio vaccine, while the country’s armed forces have asked the government to provide large quantities of the vaccine to fulfil its ownneeds.
A meeting of the department’s steering committee on Wednesday decided to ask Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif to waive Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) rules to facilitate the expeditious purchase of oral polio vaccine (OPV).
The committee was told that Punjab currently had only 400,000 doses of OPV in stock and that the province would require nearly two million further doses to avoid a crisis.
