Australia-UNICEF partnership provides vaccine refrigerators, syringes

Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Women, Marise Payne, in Vietnam on an official visit, announced the delivery at a symbolic handover ceremony in Hanoi.

The syringes and cooler boxes are being distributed to vaccination points as needed. The vaccine refrigerators will be delivered to remote communes in 35 provinces that currently lack this equipment. With a storage capacity of 61L, the refrigerators will each be able to store enough vaccine doses to cover the local target population in the communes, according to UNICEF.

The partnership is part of the Australian government’s AUD60 million ($44.3 million) package of support for Covid-19 vaccine access in Vietnam, and complements its commitment to deliver approximately 5.2 million vaccine doses.

Vietnamese Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long thanked the support provided by the Australian Government and UNICEF in Vietnam's Covid fight. He said 5.2 million doses that Australia has pledged Vietnam was "a meaningful present."

Rana Flowers, UNICEF Representative in Vietnam, said the cold chain equipment ensures that the vaccines are safely stored and delivered, ensuring that people in the remotest of areas have access to safe vaccines, including those for Covid-19.

Announced in April 2021, the Australia-UNICEF partnership provides a package that will assist Vietnam across a range of areas to help with its mass immunization program against Covid-19, to ensure that vaccine distribution and coverage is safe, adequate and equitable.

Along with upgrades to cold chain equipment and the purchase of immunization devices, the partnership supports training for healthcare workers, communication campaigns, monitoring of vaccine deployment and planning and implementation of the vaccine rollout in remote provinces.