Another shipment of Pfizer vaccine to arrive in Vietnam this week

Nearly 218,000 doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine are expected to be delivered to Vietnam in a couple of days, according to the Ministry of Health.

The vaccine will be transferred directly to the cold storage facility of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology upon arriving at Noi Bai International Airport in Hanoi.

The shipment will raise the total number of the Pfizer vaccine doses Vietnam has received from the manufacturer to nearly 1,270,000.

Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long said in early August that Vietnam is set to receive between 47-50 million doses of the Pfizer doses in the fourth quarter of this year.

Pfizer is one of the six coronavirus vaccines that has been approved for emergency use by the Ministry of Health. Other approved vaccines are AstraZeneca, Moderna, Sinopharm, Sputnik V, and Janssen.

Vietnam has so far received nearly 19 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from different sources.

It has ramped up the national vaccination campaign nationwide, with nearly 400,000 shots given daily. More than 12 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, and close to 1.1 million people have received the second shot.

Vietnam aims to vaccinate 70% of the population or 75 million people by early 2022 to achieve herd immunity.