Vietnam receives nearly 700,000 more AstraZeneca vaccine doses

By Thu Anh July 28, 2021 | 11:25 pm PT

A cold storage container with AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine doses arrives at HCMC's Tan Son Nhat Airport. Photo by VnExpress/Phong Lan.

659,900 AstraZeneca vaccine doses arrived in HCMC Thursday morning as part of a deal between the firm and VNVC.

The batch is the sixth in a contract between Vietnam Vaccine JSC (VNVC) and AstraZeneca to purchase 30 million doses. VNVC has so far received 3.8 million AstraZeneca doses.

Previous batches arrived in HCMC in February, May and July, with this month alone seeing three batches landing on the Tan Son Nhat Airport. All were transferred into cold storage before they are distributed by the Ministry of Health to different localities.

In the first half of this year, Vietnam has received around 9.3 million Covid-19 vaccine doses by AstraZeneca either through contracts, global vaccine access mechanism Covax or foreign aids. AstraZeneca doses account for around 62 percent of all vaccine doses available to Vietnam at the moment.

The country has now received over 14.8 million Covid-19 vaccine doses. Over 5.3 million shots have been given so far, with over 496,000 people having been fully vaccinated.