A shipment of 115,000 AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines arrives at Cairo International Airport from Latvia, 29 January 2022. Egyptian Ministry of Health
The shipment, which arrived on Saturday evening, will undergo examination at the laboratories of the Egyptian Drug Authority (EDA) before they are distributed to vaccination centres nationwide, the ministry said in a statement.
Egypt said on Saturday it also received around four million Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines from the United Kingdom earlier in the week.
Egypt has imported tens of millions of doses of all major coronavirus vaccines, including Sinovac, Sinopharm, Sputnik V, Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson and has opened 1,393 vaccination centres in all governorates.
The EDA also issued an emergency use authorisation for Merck’s COVID-19 drug Molnupiravir and allowed five national companies to manufacture the oral antiviral.
The country has succeeded in producing 25,000 Molnupiravir packages, with the availability of raw materials sufficient to manufacture about 150,000 additional packages, Head of the EDA Tamer Essam said last week.
Egypt has so far administered a total of 37,157,139 first vaccine doses and 25,769,453 second vaccine doses, according to the health ministry’s daily statistics.
A total of 615,876 booster shots have been injected in recent weeks, as per the health ministry, bringing the total number of coronavirus vaccines administered to the population since the start of the mass vaccination campaign in January 2021 to 63,536,468 jabs.
The country has been battling a considerable surge in daily positive cases in recent weeks, with the last five days witnessing unprecedented daily infections.
Earlier this month, Presidential Adviser for Health Affairs Mohamed Awad Tag El-Din affirmed that the highly infectious coronavirus variant Omicron is responsible for the vast majority of cases in Egypt.
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