by Suresh Perera
The first consignment of 200,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19 is expected to reach Sri Lanka by the end of January or early February, a senior health official said.
The stock of the newly developed US vaccine, now being administered in many countries across the globe, will be channeled to Colombo through the World Health Organization (WHO), he noted.
The WHO has agreed to provide around 4.2 million qualified vaccines to Sri Lanka to inoculate about 20 percent of the population.
“We are optimistic that the vaccination pledged by Pfizer/BioNTech will be the first lot to arrive so that we will able to initiate the Covid-19 inoculation campaign at least by next month (February)”, the high-ranking official said.
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by Suresh Perera
The purported “sacking” of the Lanka Sathosa Chairman over what was described as a “scandal” in the procurement of rice captured intense media attention, but Nushad Perera, who headed the country’s biggest retail chain, dismissed the claims as “bunkum”.
“I was neither sacked as Chairman nor was there a ‘rice deal’, as claimed”, he said last week.
He said that he resigned on December 31, 2020, to take up his new appointment as Chairman of the Sri Lanka Standards Institution (SLSI) as the President wanted him to build up the national standards body to broad-base benchmarking the country’s export sector.