Egypt will receive 148.2 million coronavirus vaccine doses between August and the end of the year, which are enough to vaccinate 83.7 million people, Health Minister Hala Zayed said on Thursday. In a meeting with Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly in New Alamein city, Zayed said that Egypt is cooperating with UNICEF to provide the country with 63 vaccine storage refrigerators free of charge, a Cabinet statement read. The refrigerators, with a total storage capacity of around 619,000 doses, will be used to store the Pfizer vaccine doses scheduled to arrive in Egypt within days, the minister said. From August until the end of the year, the country will receive 20 million Sputnik vaccine doses, 20 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, 35.6 million AstraZeneca doses and 2.4 million Pfizer doses, Zayed said. Egypt will also receive during this period raw materials required to locally produce 70.2 million doses of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine, according to the minister. For Egyptians wishing to travel abroad, the ministry has prepared 125 offices in all governorates for citizens to register and print coronavirus vaccination certificates with QR codes, Zayed said. Egypt is working to make available the vaccines required for traveling to the European Union, the United States and the Arabian Gulf countries, Zayed added. Egypt has announced plans to vaccinate 40 million citizens against the coronavirus by the end of the year. However, it has only vaccinated a few million so far reportedly due to a delay in vaccine delivery. "We were expecting 20 percent of Egypt's population to be vaccinated by the end of the year. Today, we are only talking about around four million people having been vaccinated because promises to Egypt in terms of vaccine delivery were not met," World Health Organisation (WHO) representative in Egypt Naeema Al-Gasseer said in an interview this month. During her meeting with Madbouly today, the minister also referred to the World Hepatitis Day marked annually on 28 July, saying the World Health Organisation has hailed the Egyptian model of concerted efforts to deal with Hepatitis. Last year, Egypt celebrated becoming free of Hepatitis C after a seven-month presidential initiative, which started in 2018, screened citizens for Hepatitis and non-communicable diseases. The initiative, dubbed 100 Million Health, screened 60 million people, according to the health ministry.
