Bhutan has fully vaccinated 90% of its eligible adult population in a week with Covid-19 shots, a feat that has been described as a success story for other countries in the region, the UN Children’s Fund said Tuesday.
The tiny South Asian kingdom of 770,00 people is nestled in the Himalayas between India and China, and its high altitude, remote mountain villages, nomadic herders and extreme weather posed unique challenges to health workers delivering the vaccines.
But by Tuesday, about 480,000 people had been vaccinated out of an eligible population of 530,000 people, UNICEF’s Bhutan representative Will Parks said, adding that it was “arguably the fastest vaccination campaign to be executed during a pandemic.”
