HARARE – Zimbabwe says it will take delivery of an average one million doses of Covid-19 vaccines every month until it has inoculated at least 60 percent of its 15 million people.
Finance minister Mthuli Ncube made the announcement on Thursday, a day after Zimbabwe took delivery of its biggest consignment of doses to date, and the second it has paid for – 1.056 million Sinovac jabs from China.
“Going forward, the country will be receiving about one million doses of Covid-19 vaccines per month from additional purchases aimed at reaching the herd immunity target,” Ncube said in a statement.
Herd immunity is the point where there are enough people that have been either infected or vaccinated that transmission in the community is negligible, experts say. If one case leads to less than one new infection, then the virus eventually peters out.
Zimbabwe has budgeted US$100 million for vaccines, Ncube said.
German international courier, package delivery and express mail service DHL International had offered Zimbabwe “concessionary tariffs” for the shipment of vaccines, Ncube said, adding that this would guarantee “timeous and safe delivery” of the life-saving jabs.
Zimbabwe had already received a consignment of 144,000 Sinovac jabs which it paid for as part of an order of 1.2 million jabs before the recent delivery.
The country kicked off its vaccination programme in mid-February after China made a donation of 400,000 doses of its Sinopharm vaccine, before India weighed in with 35,000 doses of the Covaxin with a similar number still to be delivered.
Zimbabwe might have 1.635 million vaccine doses, but the pace of vaccination has been slow.
On Wednesday, the ministry of health said 76,995 people had taken at least one dose of the vaccines – a far cry from its targets.
The slow pace of vaccination has been linked to too few centres designated for the vaccination programme.
In Harare, long queues have been forming at Wilkins Hospital everyday – leading to frustrations.
“We have been here for hours since early morning but we see that government officials and Chinese nationals are jumping the queue,” a man waiting in the queue complained.
“What’s special about them, because every Zimbabwean matters?”
National Covid-19 taskforce coordinator Dr Agnes Mahomva acknowledged the problem of limited vaccination centres
“The ministry is currently working on rolling out more vaccine centres as we speak,” she told ZimLive.
“We’ll see more vaccination centers countrywide. We want to avoid a situation where people congest at Wilkins Hospital, risking the spread of Covid-19 again.”
The virus has killed at least 1,523 Zimbabweans from 36,882 infections since it was first detected in March last year.
