India has donated 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to war-torn Afghanistan, the first set of vaccines the country has received to date.
Acting Minister of Health, Wahid Majrooh, addressing local reporters at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul said that they awaited the emergency approval from the World Health Organisation (WHO) before administering the vaccines, Al Jazeera reports.
“The vaccines we have received are under the WHO certification process. According to our conversation with WHO, they told us that the approval process of this vaccine certification takes a week to 10 days,” Majrooh said.
Ghulam Dastagir Nazari, head of the immunisation programme at the country’s health ministry, said the doses would be stored in Kabul until the emergency authorisation was received. The government says health workers and senior citizens with chronic medical conditions will be prioritised.
The coronavirus was first recorded in Afghanistan in February 2020 and so far Afghanistan has recorded 55,300 confirmed cases and 2,400 deaths.
In August last year, a health ministry survey revealed that 10 million people – nearly a third of the country’s population – had been infected with the coronavirus.
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