Vietnam seeks to diversify COVID-19 vaccine options amid supply issues
26 March, 2021
Vietnam on Wednesday (Mar 24) needed urgent diversification of its sources for COVID-19 vaccines amid global supply complications, seeing as the Southeast Asian region pushes forward with a great inoculation program that started out earlier this month.
"COVID-19 vaccine supplies for Vietnam have been impacted by the challenging developments of the coronavirus pandemic on the globe," the federal government said on a statement.
Vietnam's Drug Administration possesses asked importers to attempt to secure at the earliest opportunity safe and sound vaccines from more options, including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson , Russia's Sputnik V, Moderna and China's Sinovac, the statement said.
Vietnam's vaccination campaign, which was launched on Mar 8, has got relied solely on the batch of 117,600 dosages of the AstraZeneca vaccine it received last month.
The country has up to now approved the AstraZeneca and Sputnik V vaccines for use against COVID-19.
Previously Wednesday, UNICEF said on behalf of the COVAX vaccine-sharing service that the projected deliveries of COVID-19 vaccines to all countries, including Vietnam, needed to be delayed due to production delays.
"Vietnam is now due to receive 811,200 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the next 3 weeks," UNICEF explained. "This quantity is definitely smaller than previously released for the 1st shipment."
The federal government has previously said it could get a total of 150 million vaccine doses, through immediate purchases from producers and via the COVAX vaccine-sharing scheme.
The Ministry of Health said the other day that Vietnam's first domestically developed COVID-19 vaccine, called Nanocovax, is likely to be put into use in 2022, noting that four Vietnamese companies were engaged in vaccine research and production and two were undertaking individual tests.
The Southeast Asian country has been praised because of its efforts to support the virus through mass testing and tracing and strict quarantining. It has recorded 2,576 COVID-19 attacks and 35 deaths because of the disease.
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