Iran taking delivery of large COVID vaccine shipment: CBI chief
Iran is to take delivery of large coronavirus vaccine shipment later this week after the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) made payments for the consignment on Thursday.
CBI governor Abdolnasser Hemmati said that the bank had transferred the exchange required for purchase of several million doses of vaccines earlier in the day.
Hemmati said a first batch of the shipment containing one million doses of the unidentified vaccine will arrive in Iran on Saturday.
Iran has already imported more than 2.2 million doses of coronavirus vaccines to use it in a nationwide inoculation program against COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Customs office IRICA said on Thursday that the number of Sputnik V vaccines supplied from Russia reached 720,000 after a small shipment arrived in Iran earlier in the day.
Iranian government officials say they have signed contracts with Russia for supply of over 60 million doses of Sputnik V. The two countries are also planning to launch joint manufacturing of the jab inside Iran.
Other vaccines imported into Iran include 650,000 doses of China’s Sinopharm, 150,000 doses of Indian-made COVAXIN and 708,000 doses of vaccines supplied by COVAX, an international project sponsored by the World Health Organization, according to comments by an IRICA official made on Thursday.
Iranian authorities hope vaccinations would accelerate after the roll-out of domestically produced jabs planned for late next month.
Two main home-made vaccine candidates include the Pasteur, a vaccine based on Cuba’s Soberana 2, and Coviran Barekat, a purely Iranian-made jab which is expected to reach mass production in early summer.
Iran’s health ministry said on Thursday that the daily death toll from COVID-19 had declined from peaks seen earlier this week to a total of 385 from a caseload of 19,899.
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