Vietnam to buy another 20 mln Pfizer vaccine doses

The Health Ministry will start the process to get the vaccine as soon as possible. Vietnam plans to inoculate 70 percent of its population against Covid-19 and is trying to procure the needed vaccines in various ways.

The first one million of Pfizer doses arrived in July and another three million are set to be delivered this month. The remaining 47 million doses are expected to be delivered in fourth quarter of the year.

A vial labelled with the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine is seen in this illustration picture taken March 19, 2021. Photo by Reuters/Dado Ruvic

The government had in June also agreed to buy 30 million doses of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine from the Vietnam Vaccine JSC (VNVC).

VNVC had ordered 30 million Covid-19 vaccine doses from British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca, and is handing delivered doses to the Ministry of Health on a non-profit basis.

Vietnam so far has received 19 million doses of Covid -19 vaccine from the deal with VNVC, the global vaccine access mechanism Covax, and as support from other countries. This includes 11.5 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine, 12,000 doses of Sputnik V, 746,000 doses of Pfizer, more than 5 million doses of Moderna, and 1.5 million doses of Sinopharm vaccine.

The Health Ministry has approved the administration of the Pfizer vaccine as the second dose for those who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine as their first. The second Pfizer dose will only be administered with the consent of the recipient.

Around 12.5 million of the country’s 96 million people have got at least one shot of a Covid-19 vaccine. More than 1.3 million people have been fully vaccinated with two shots.