Sending "700,000 doses" of AstraZeneca vaccine to Iran

The spokesperson for the Food and Drug Administration of Iran announced the loading and sending of the first shipment of the coronavirus vaccine to Iran by the COVAX program.

Kianoush Jahanpour announced on Twitter on Sunday that the first shipment of vaccines produced by the COVAX mechanism, including more than 700,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, had been loaded and sent from Amsterdam to Tehran.

According to him, Iran's total purchase order from the Covax basket is 16.8 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine, and these 700,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were also produced by the South Korean company SK Bio.

On April 1, the fifth shipment of the Russian vaccine "Sputnik V" was sent to Iran, which included 100,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine. However, the slow vaccination process in Iran has drawn much criticism and warnings. Some officials in the Iranian medical system have reported "missing the opportunity" in importing the coronavirus vaccine.

Iran has not yet released updated vaccination statistics, but as of April 27, only 161,601,000 doses of vaccine had been administered in Iran, equivalent to less than two-tenths of a percent of the total Iranian population.

The total number of coronavirus vaccines imported into the country, including the 700,000-dose shipment from AstraZeneca, is 1,685,000 doses. Considering that 100,000 doses of the Cuban vaccine are experimental, the number of vaccines that can be injected for the target population is 1,585,000 doses.

This comes as some of Iran's neighbors have accelerated the process of vaccinating their populations. For example, the Republic of Azerbaijan, which had administered only half a million doses of the vaccine to its citizens last week, increased this figure to nearly one million people on Sunday, with more than half of them receiving a second dose of the vaccine, and four million doses of the vaccine also arrived in the country in the middle of last week.

Türkiye has also vaccinated 11.5% of its population so far, and 8.5% of them have received the second dose of the vaccine.

Saudi Arabia has vaccinated nearly 5 million people, the UAE 8.5 million, Qatar 900,000, Kuwait 600,000, and Bahrain 800,000 of their population.

Source: Radio Farda