China has expressed annoyance over making public its offered selling price of Sinopharm vaccine to Bangladesh.

The two countries had signed a non-disclosure agreement guaranteeing that the selling price would not be disclosed.

"We have expressed regrets to the Chinese ambassador over the matter. But this has made our position very bad," Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen told private TV station Channel24 yesterday.

He said the government would not be able to buy the Sinopharm vaccine at this price in future.

The minister said Bangladesh now have to buy the vaccine at prices it was sold to other countries, which is almost double or triple the price offered to Bangladesh.

At a briefing on May 27, a Cabinet Division official told reporters that the government was purchasing the vaccine at $10 per dose.

The briefing was held after a cabinet committee meeting approved a proposal for buying 1.5 crore shots of Sinopharm's Covid-19 vaccine, paving the way for the final agreement.

As the news spread online through different media outlets, ministry officials contested the disclosure saying that the price was yet to be approved.

The Directorate General of Health Services has written a letter to the Chinese embassy in Dhaka, expressing regrets, said Prof Abul Bashar Mohammad Khurshid Alam, director general of DGHS.

"We said we did not make the price public intentionally, but it became public somehow. We wrote a letter to them, but they are yet to respond to it," he told Channel24.

Khurshid said China sold the vaccine to Sri Lanka for $14 per dose and to Indonesia for $17.

"After learning about the selling price to Bangladesh, those countries are pressing China to sell the vaccine at lower prices. They [China] became very much annoyed with us."

Despite several attempts, this newspaper could not reach the foreign minister over the phone for comments.