85% of capital city partially jabbed against COVID-19, only 15% of Pakistan’s largest province — data

A health worker prepares to inoculate a man with a dose of the Sinopharm Covid-19 coronavirus at a vaccination centre in Karachi on May 23, 2021. (AFP)
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Updated 13 October 2021
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85% of capital city partially jabbed against COVID-19, only 15% of Pakistan’s largest province — data

  • Arab News gathers vaccine data from Islamabad and four provinces, all figures are with respect to eligible population until September 30
  • Fully vaccinated Pakistanis constituted 26 percent of target population of 125 million, 47 percent people in Islamabad fully jabbed

ISLAMABAD/LAHORE: The Pakistani capital is leading in the country in administering COVID-19 vaccines to its eligible population, with health ministry data up until September 30 showing that over 85 percent percent of people in Islamabad had received a first dose and 47 percent were fully vaccinated, while only 15 percent of the target group in the country’s least populous province of Balochistan had as yet been administered one jab.
The government of Prime Minister Imran Khan launched a national vaccination drive in February this year, prioritizing health care workers and elderly citizens before broadening the campaign to the public. Now in the fourth wave of the pandemic, Pakistani officials say a ramped up vaccination campaign has helped to push daily infection rates down from a peak of over nine percent in August to less than two percent currently.
Around 125 million of Pakistan’s 220 million total population is eligible to receive a coronavirus vaccine. Among the eligible population, around 90 million have received at least one dose since February, health ministry data shows.
As of Monday this week, fully vaccinated Pakistanis constituted 26 percent of the target population, with all federating units saying they were ramping up efforts to boost daily vaccination rates by launching door-to-door campaigns and forbidding unjabbed people from using public transportation, air travel, buying fuel at petrol stations and availing other essential services.
“COVID-19 vaccination has helped us reduce severity of disease and hospitalization rates among those infected with the virus in Islamabad,” Dr. Hasan Orooj, Director General Health Services in Islamabad, told Arab News, saying the administration was vaccinating eligible people at public transport stands, weekly bazaars and public and private offices also.
“We [Islamabad] are well ahead of our [vaccination] target, but still people should continue to follow health guidelines to prevent the next wave,” Orooj cautioned, adding that his teams were also working to bridge a existing vaccination gap between rural and urban areas of the capital.
“The vaccination numbers in Islamabad’s rural areas are comparatively low, and we are mobilizing our special teams to bring it at par with urban areas,” he said.
According to official data collected by Arab News from all four provinces and Islamabad, the impoverished Balochistan province has the lowest vaccination rates, with only seven percent of the province fully vaccinated and 15 percent partially jabbed. The province is Pakistan’s largest — it makes up over 40 percent of the total land area of Pakistan — but least populous.
Statistics show a total of 1.25 million individuals — including people from other cities — had received at least one dose of a vaccine in Islamabad as of last week, though only 686,905 people had been fully vaccinated.
Islamabad’s eligible population for the COVID-19 vaccination is about 1.46 million, of which 47 percent is fully vaccinated, health department data showed.
PUNJAB
In Punjab, 45 percent people are partially vaccinated, followed by 39 percent in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, 35.53 percent in Sindh and 15 percent in Balochistan.
Punjab Health Secretary Imran Sikandar Baloch said approximately 233 million people in the province had been administered a first dose, while a second dose had been administered to more than 10 million people.
“Punjab is leading the national vaccination drive both in numbers and percentages,” Baloch said.
Sharing the vaccination data of major cities in the province, the secretary said 58 percent of Rawalpindi’s population had been administered the first dose, 53 percent of Multan’s, 51 percent of Lahore’s, 52 percent of Gujranwala’s and 41 percent of Faisalabad’s.
The districts of Jhelum and Mandi Bahauddin had partially vaccinated 69 percent and 62 percent eligible individuals respectively, the secretary said.
To boost inoculation numbers, Baloch said the provincial government had devised door-to-door campaigns especially in rural and hard-to-reach areas.
“We have also decided to target small populated units with mobile vaccination centers,” he added.
SINDH
In Sindh province, 35.53 percent of 34.8 million eligible individuals had been partially vaccinated, according to the health department. The number of those who had received at least one dose in the province stood at 12.4 million while 5.4 million were fully vaccinated, according to official data compiled until Thursday.
Data from the different divisions of Sindh showed Karachi division was 42.81 percent partially vaccinated, Hyderabad division 29.68 percent, Sukkur division 26.03 percent, Mirpur Khas division 48.94 percent, Shaheed Benazir Abad division 34.06 percent and Larkana division 24.54 percent.
Sindh had administered 150,000 vaccines per day on average in the last two weeks in Sindh province, Mehar Khursheed, a spokesperson for the Sindh Health Department, said.
Sindh is home to Pakistan’s port city of Karachi, the nation’s financial hub, where the vaccine rate is higher than in other parts of the province.
Khursheed said the vaccination rate was high in urban districts due to high awareness among people, while the district administration was strictly implementing an obligatory vaccine regime to improve vaccination numbers in low-performing districts.
“Sindh is the first province that has taken bold steps in terms of the obligatory regime to increase in vaccination coverage like blocking mobile phone SIMs, banning commercial activities and travel by unvaccinated people,” Khursheed told Arab News.
KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWA
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, authorities have partially vaccinated around 39 percent of its target population. Overall, more than nine million people from the northwestern province had received a first dose while 3.2 million were fully vaccinated, according to the provincial health department.
Dr. Niaz Muhammad, Director General KP health, said some districts such as Abbottabad, Haripur, Mansehra, Chitral, Orakzai, Peshawar and Kurram had good vaccination results but poor awareness continued to fuel vaccine hesitancy and low immunization rates in other areas.
“We are sending outreach teams in view of reluctance among some people and carrying out mass door-to-door vaccination,” Muhammad told Arab News. “People had some concerns due to some media reports coupled with poor awareness but we’re working to improve our communication strategy.” 
In addition, he said the government had already announced an obligatory vaccine regime under which the transport sector and school children would need to have received one COVID-19 dose by October 15.
BALOCHISTAN
In Balochistan, official data showed that around 1,482,791 people had been vaccinated in 33 districts of the province between February and September.
Dr. Naqeeb Niazi, Deputy In-charge Operation Cell Primary and Secondary Health Department in Balochistan, said first dose coverage in the province had reached up to 15 percent while only seven percent were fully vaccinated — the lowest vaccination rate in the country.
“We have been implementing an obligatory regime of vaccination from October 1, and hope the vaccination number will increase in districts with low numbers by October 31,” Niazi told Arab News.
A senior official at the National Command and Operation Center (NCOC), Pakistan’s federal pandemic response body, said vaccination rates varied “because of the peculiar environment and population of every province.”
“Punjab is leading the vaccination drive among provinces because it is the most populated territory in the country,” he said, declining to be named. “Similarly the low turnout in Balochistan is due to its geographic location, not because of less government motivation to vaccinate the provincial population.”
He said people in the remote, sparsely populated Balochistan province had to travel long distances to reach vaccination centers, while lack of awareness and misinformation also continued to fuel low rates in the region.
“Vaccination numbers are usually low in rural areas of the country for different reasons, including low motivation and luxury to avoid government-imposed restrictions because they don’t need to travel by air or go to restaurants for which it is mandatory to get vaccinated now,” the official said.
- Additional reporting by Naimat Khan in Karachi, Rehmat Mehsud in Peshawar and Saadullah Akhter in Quetta


UN watchdog says Australia violated rights of asylum seekers from Pakistan, other nations

Updated 6 sec ago
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UN watchdog says Australia violated rights of asylum seekers from Pakistan, other nations

  • Under a hard-line policy, Australia sent thousands of migrants attempting to reach the country by boat to ‘offshore processing’ centers
  • The first case examined by the panel involved 24 unaccompanied minors from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar

GENEVA: Australia violated the rights of asylum seekers arbitrarily detained on the island of Nauru, a UN watchdog ruled Thursday, in a warning to other countries intent on outsourcing asylum processing.
The UN Human Rights Committee published decisions in two cases involving 25 refugees and asylum seekers who endured years of arbitrary detention in the island nation.
The panel of 18 independent experts found that in both cases Australia violated the rights of migrants, including minors who received insufficient water and health care.
“A state party cannot escape its human rights responsibility when outsourcing asylum processing to another state,” committee member Mahjoub El Haiba said in a statement.
The UN body called on Australia to provide adequate compensation to the migrants and to take steps to ensure similar violations do not recur.
The committee has no power to compel states to follow its rulings, but its decisions carry reputational weight.
Australia’s government said it was considering the committee’s views and would give a response “in due course.”
“It has been the Australian government’s consistent position that Australia does not exercise effective control over regional processing centers,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs.
“Transferees who are outside of Australia’s territory or its effective control do not engage Australia’s international obligations.”
Under a hard-line policy introduced in 2012, Australia sent thousands of migrants attempting to reach the country by boat to “offshore processing” centers.
They were held in two detention centers — one on Nauru and another, since shuttered, on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
The UN committee rejected Australia’s argument that rights abuses that occurred on Nauru did not fall within its jurisdiction.
It highlighted that Australia had arranged for the establishment of Nauru’s regional processing center and contributed to its operation and management.
El Haiba said Australia “had significant control and influence over the regional processing facility in Nauru.”
A number of European countries have been examining the possibility of similar arrangements to outsource their migration policies.
Thursday’s decisions “send a clear message to all states: Where there is power or effective control, there is responsibility,” El Haiba said.
“The outsourcing of operations does not absolve states of accountability. Offshore detention facilities are not human rights-free zones.”
The first case examined by the committee involved 24 unaccompanied minors from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
They were intercepted at sea by Australia and transferred in 2014 to Nauru’s overcrowded Regional Processing Center.
They were held there “with insufficient water supply and sanitation, high temperatures and humidity, as well as inadequate health care,” Thursday’s statement said.
“Almost all of these minors have suffered from deterioration of physical and mental well-being, including self-harm, depression, kidney problems, insomnia, headaches, memory problems and weight loss.”
Even though all but one of the minors were granted refugee status around September 2014, they remained detained in Nauru, the committee said.
It added that Australia had failed to justify why the minors could not have been transferred to centers on the mainland more suitable for vulnerable individuals.
The committee separately evaluated the case of an Iranian asylum seeker who arrived by boat on Christmas Island with several family members in August 2013 and was transferred seven months later to Nauru.
The woman was recognized as a refugee by Nauru authorities in 2017, but was not released.
In November 2018, she was transferred to Australia for medical reasons, but remained detained in various facilities there, the committee said.
It determined that Australia had failed to show that the woman’s prolonged and indefinite detention was justified.


12 miners left stranded in southwestern Pakistan as coal mine collapses

Updated 26 min 35 sec ago
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12 miners left stranded in southwestern Pakistan as coal mine collapses

  • Coal mine in Balochistan’s Sanjdi area collapses due to methane explosion, says official 
  • Pakistan’s mines are known to have hazardous working conditions, poor safety standards

QUETTA: Twelve miners were left stranded on Thursday after a coal mine in southwestern Pakistan caved in due to a gas explosion, an official confirmed, as rescue teams reached the spot to save their lives. 
The mine collapse took place in southwestern Balochistan province’s Sanjdi area, located around 40 kilometers from the provincial capital of Quetta. 
Abdul Ghani, chief mine inspector of the provincial mining department, said a private coal mine caved in because of a methane gas explosion that occurred around 6:00 p.m. on Thursday evening. 
“12 coal mine workers were stranded inside the mine,” Ghani told Arab News. 
He added that rescue teams from Sanjdi and Quetta had reached the site and were attempting to save the stranded miners. 
In response to a question, Ghani said he was not aware whether the miners were alive or dead as it was difficult to ascertain that since the mine had collapsed. 
Pakistan’s mines are known to have hazardous working conditions and poor safety standards, where deadly incidents are not uncommon.
Twelve miners were killed in a gas explosion at the same mine in June last year.


Pakistan reiterates support for peace and stability in Sudan as war rages on

Updated 09 January 2025
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Pakistan reiterates support for peace and stability in Sudan as war rages on

  • Pakistan’s foreign minister discusses bilateral ties, civil war in Sudan with Sudanese counterpart
  • A 20-month civil war has killed over 24,000 in Sudan, driven more than 14 million from their homes

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar on Thursday reiterated Islamabad’s support for peace and stability in Sudan, reiterating the desire for his country to strengthen bilateral ties with the African country. 
Sudanese people have suffered due to a 20-month civil war between the army and a paramilitary group that has killed over 24,000 and driven over 14 million from their homes in the country, according to the UN. 
Dar received a telephone call from Dr. Ali Youssef Ahmed Al-Sharif, the foreign minister of Sudan, the foreign office said. The two discussed bilateral ties between Pakistan and Sudan, and the war in the African country. 
“DPM/FM reiterated Pakistan’s historic and fraternal ties with the people of Sudan,” Pakistan’s foreign office said in a statement. 
“Expressed desire to further strengthen bilateral cooperation. Reassured Pakistan’s support for peace and stability in Sudan.”
Due to the prolonged war in the African country, an estimated 3.2 million Sudanese have crossed into neighboring countries, including Chad, Egypt and South Sudan, to escape the horrors of the conflict, as per the UN.
Pakistan’s United Nations Ambassador Munir Akram this week raised alarm at the UN Security Council over the worsening food security situation in Sudan, urging both warring parties to agree to an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. 
Akram called on the international community to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Sudan and bridge the 36 percent funding gap for humanitarian appeals relating to Sudan.
“The international community must unite to support a common vision for return to peace and normalcy in Sudan,” he said. 
“Foreign interference in the internal conflict of Sudan must stop. The UNSC arms embargo on Sudan must be respected.”


Pakistan eyes enhanced trade with Indonesia ahead of its president’s visit 

Updated 09 January 2025
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Pakistan eyes enhanced trade with Indonesia ahead of its president’s visit 

  • Indonesia’s president is expected to visit Pakistan later in January to discuss trade, bilateral issues
  • Planning minister calls for cooperation with Indonesia in education, health, information and tourism

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal has directed officials to devise a strategy to boost bilateral trade with Indonesia, state-run media reported on Thursday, as Islamabad gears up to welcome President Prabowo Subianto to the country later this month. 
Pakistan and Indonesia have attempted to bolster their economic ties through trade and investment over the years. The two countries signed a Preferential Trade Agreement in 2012 that became operational in September 2013, allowing for concessional market access to 232 goods from Pakistan such as fresh fruits, cotton and fabrics, and 313 from Indonesia, such as edible palm oil products, sugar confectionaries and cocoa products.
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif confirmed that Subianto will be in Pakistan later this month an official visit to the country.
“The minister directed the relevant authorities to formulate concrete proposals to enhance trade relations, emphasizing the need to strategically target the Indonesian market to showcase Pakistani products effectively,” the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) said. 
Iqbal was speaking to officials while he chaired a meeting of a committee constituted by Sharif to enhance bilateral cooperation and trade between both countries ahead of Subianto’s visit. 
“This landmark visit will open new avenues for trade and cooperation, further strengthening bilateral relations between Pakistan and Indonesia,” APP quoted Iqbal as saying. 
“Indonesia has successfully integrated its cultural diversity into a unified identity. We can learn from their model.”
Iqbal stressed collaboration with Indonesia in the education, health, information technology and tourism sectors. He also suggested providing scholarships in IT and health care sectors to students from both countries.
In October last year, Pakistan and Indonesia signed bilateral trade pacts and memorandums of understanding worth $10.7 million during an Indonesian trade expo.
According to the Pakistan Business Council, the trade relationship between Pakistan and Indonesia holds significant potential for growth, with opportunities for increased cooperation in areas like agriculture, textiles, and energy.


Pakistani authorities report 70th polio case of 2024 from Karachi

Updated 09 January 2025
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Pakistani authorities report 70th polio case of 2024 from Karachi

  • Onset of polio case took place in December 2024, say Pakistani health authorities
  • Pakistan has reported 20 out of 70 poliovirus cases from southern Sindh province

KARACHI: Pakistani health authorities reported the country’s 70th poliovirus case of 2024 on Thursday, saying that its symptoms started becoming apparent in a child last month in the southern port city of Karachi, the polio eradication program said. 
Polio is a paralyzing disease with no cure. Multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine and completion of the routine vaccination schedule for all children under the age of five are essential to provide high immunity against the disease.
As per the program, the onset of this case was on Dec. 21, 2024 and the case was reported in the Karachi East district. With the latest case, the district has now reported two polio cases from 2024. 
“The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health has confirmed the detection of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) in a male child from Karachi East,” the program said in a statement. 
As per the latest toll, out of the 70 poliovirus cases of 2024, 27 have been reported from Balochistan, 21 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 20 from Sindh, and one each from Punjab and Islamabad.
The Pakistan Polio Program organizes several mass vaccination campaigns annually, delivering the vaccine directly to people’s doorsteps.
On Jan. 6, Pakistan concluded a week-long anti-polio drive in southwestern Balochistan.
The health ministry said the first nationwide polio campaign of this year is scheduled to take place from Feb. 3-9, urging the parents to ensure the safety of their children by welcoming the vaccinators.
Pakistan’s polio program began in 1994 but efforts to eradicate the virus have since been undermined by vaccine misinformation and opposition from some religious hard-liners, who say immunization is a foreign ploy to sterilize Muslim children or a cover for Western spies.
Militant groups also frequently attack and kill members of polio vaccination teams.
In the early 1990s, the country reported around 20,000 cases annually, but in 2018, the number dropped to eight cases. Six cases were reported in 2023 and only one in 2021.