Japan to gift Vietnam another million Covid vaccine doses in July

The donation had been announced by Japan's Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi last Friday.

It will be the second donation from Japan after the first batch of 966,320 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on June 16.

A majority of the first batch, or 806,000 doses, had been given to Ho Chi Minh City for its mass inoculation program, the biggest in Vietnam’s vaccination history.

Between June 19 and 27, the city had vaccinated 710,773 people.

The Health Ministry said the vaccine batch from Japan "has arrived at a perfect time to help Vietnam contain Covid-19."

Vietnam aims to procure 150 million doses of vaccines to cover 70 percent of its population this yearat an estimated cost of VND25.2 trillion ($1.09 billion), the Health Ministry had announced earlier.

As of Tuesday, it had received almost 4.5 million doses: 2.5 million of AstraZeneca vaccine doses via the Covax mechanism; more than 400,000 secured through a contract to buy 30 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses by Vietnam Vaccine JSC (VNVC); almost one million doses donated by Japan and 500,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccine gifted by China.

Almost 3.5 million of Vietnam’s 96 million population have been vaccinated against Covid-19 and 172,994 have got two shots.

Apart from Vietnam, Japan also announced a gift of a million doses to Taiwan and is making plans to give the same to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

As planned, from mid-July, Japan will donate 11 million doses to countries in Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia as well as the Pacific Ocean's islands via the Covax facility.