This ups the total number of doses of the American-German vaccine the country has received to 8,255,520, Minister of Higher Education and Acting Health Minister Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar said in a statement.

Egypt’s Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly issued a decree on Friday to delegate Abdel-Ghaffar to undertake the duties of Health Minister Hala Zayed till her recovery.

Zayed was hospitalised after suffering a heart attack last week, but reportedly returned home shortly afterwards.

Abdel-Ghaffar said the US government made the shipment to Egypt through the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) program, in cooperation with the Vaccine Alliance (GAVI).

Egypt received its third Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine shipment on 22 October comprising almost 1.4 million doses.

The shipments are part of 500 million Pfizer vaccine doses donated by the US to African Union countries through COVAX.

Last week, Egypt also received its third batch of 1,058,400 shots of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine through the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust in cooperation with the African Export-Import Bank.

This brought the total number of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses in Egypt to over 1.8 million.

Egypt is also waiting to receive millions of doses of the US's Moderna vaccine soon.

Egypt has vaccinated around 22 million people against coronavirus, Presidential Advisor for Health Affairs Mohamed Awad Tag El-Din told the media on 22 October.

Egypt’s vaccination campaign currently uses various types of imported vaccines, including Sinovac, AstraZeneca, Sputnik V, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer, in addition to its locally-made Sinovac/VACSERA.

Egypt aims to vaccine 40 million citizens by the end of the year, allocating almost 2,000 vaccination centres nationwide, according to Aysam Salah, advisor to health minister for information technology.