KATHMANDU (GNB): Nepal is investigating how a Bahraini prince planning to climb Mount Everest brought 2,000 coronavirus vaccine doses to the country without prior approval, authorities said.
Sheikh Mohamed Hamad Mohamed Al Khalifa, who flew into Kathmandu on Monday, planned to donate the AstraZeneca shots in a village, according to the Nepali Embassy in Bahrain.
The vaccines will be administered en route to the summit to residents of a village near a Himalayan range who recently renamed a local hill after the Gulf country’s royal family.
“It was brought without meeting the required procedure and prior consent from our office. We are investigating and will take a decision on whether it can be used,” Santosh KC, spokesman for the Department of Drug Administration, told the AFP news agency on Wednesday.
“While they are climbing, they will pass by a village with 1,000 citizens living by the Bahrain Royal Peaks and get them all vaccinated,” a post by Sheikh Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, a national security adviser and major-general, said.
“The much-needed vaccines from Bahrain will be delivered in the coming days under the guidance of the Nepal minister of health,” another post said. “Planning and administration will start early tomorrow.”
But the gesture came as a surprise to Nepal’s drug regulator, who told a local newspaper he was not aware that any vaccine supplies were arriving in the country.
“We have deployed a team of drug inspectors to investigate how the vaccines were brought into the country without any prior approval,” Bharat Bhattarai, the director general of the Department of Drug Administration, told the Kathmandu Post. “We did not know that vaccines were being imported from Bahrain.”
He said anyone importing vaccines into the country had to do it through official channels to ensure cold chain and safety requirements were met.
The Bahraini team, who have all reportedly been vaccinated, will spend a week in a hotel quarantining before they mount the 79-day expedition.
A representative from the climbing company that is organising the attempt told the Himalayan Times that members of the expedition would be administering the vaccines.
The prince’s group, which includes members of the Bahrain Royal Guard, is returning to Nepal after climbing the 8,163-metre (26,781-foot) Mount Manaslu and the 6,119-metre (20,075-foot) Lobuche in October.
At the time, there was a ban on foreign visitors because of the pandemic but Nepal made an exception and granted a permit to the prince’s team.
Nepal has now opened its borders to climbers, and the prince and his team are among the first to come to Everest this year after the virus wiped out last year’s season on the world’s highest peak.
The pandemic was a devastating blow to thousands of people in Nepal, from guides to hoteliers, who depend on the climbing industry for their livelihoods.
Mountaineers must now quarantine for seven days and present a negative test before heading out on their expedition.
Nepal began a vaccination drive in January after receiving one million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from neighbouring India.
SOURCE : AFP/Local News Agencies
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