Vaccine rollout February 14, 2021 Pakistan has moved a few steps closer to dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic that it seemed had been almost forgotten. The Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan on Friday approved the Convidecia vaccine manufactured by CanSinoBio in China. This is a positive step as the vaccine underwent trials at five centres in Pakistan and as per universal protocol should be more easily available to people in the country, as doses are handed out. In addition, it is a vaccine which requires only one shot as compared to two which are the standard requirement for most of the other vaccines in the market so far. In Pakistan, these include China’s Sinopharm vaccine, the Sputnik-5 vaccine developed by Russia, the AstraZeneca vaccine from Oxford University and a Swedish firm. And now the latest vaccine from China. It is far from certain yet how many vaccines Pakistan will be able to put together to vaccinate its enormous population. But even more significant than this is the question of how many people will allow themselves to be vaccinated. So far rollout has been slow, because of administrative difficulties reported by doctors and other medical professionals. Medical professionals have reported that in some cases they received a message from the government helpline saying that vaccination had not begun and there were problems with their identity card numbers or other documents.