UK, Czech Republic to gift Vietnam 665,000 Covid vaccines

Britain’s donation is part of nine million vaccines it will begin delivering this week to countries around the world as the first of 100 million Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged it would share at last month’s G7 Summit.

At least 80 million doses will go to the Covax facility, while the rest will go directly to countries.

"We're doing this to help the most vulnerable, but also because we know we won’t be safe until everyone is safe," Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said, as cited in a statement of the U.K. Embassy in Vietnam.

Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that the Czech Republic would gift Vietnam 250,000 doses without specifying which vaccine.

Vietnam has secured deals for 130 million doses so far and is in talks with other manufacturers for another 40 million shots, Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long said last Sunday, adding the former are expected to arrive this year and in early 2022.

The government aims to vaccinate 70 percent of the country’s 96 million population by April next year.

So far more than 5.2 million have received shots, with 496,630 being fully vaccinated.