811,200 Covax vaccine doses to arrive in Vietnam in early April

"This batch would be sent to NIHE for storage, then distributed by the Ministry of Health for inoculation," Dang Duc Anh, director of NIHE, said Tuesday.

Previously, global vaccine access mechanism Covax planned to supply Vietnam with 1.37 million Covid-19 vaccine doses produced by British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca on March 25. But due to a lack of supply, only 811,200 doses were made available in the first batch.

Rana Flowers, UNICEF's representative in Vietnam, said Covax still guarantees to give Vietnam over four million vaccine doses by the end of May despite supply shortage.

Vietnam has so far received about 117,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses for its mass Covid-19 inoculation program from 30 million doses it has ordered from the producer. It expects to receive 60 million doses in total this year from multiple sources, though the plan may be partially delayed into 2022.

The country seeks to secure 150 million Covid-19 vaccine doses this year to cover 70 percent of its population. It expects to start producing its own Covid-19 vaccine by the end of this year’s third quarter, according to the health ministry

Over 46,000 Vietnamese, mainly frontline workers in the Covid-19 fight, have received their first Covid-19 vaccine shots since March 8.