Cambodia to receive Chinese COVID-19 vaccine next month

By Riyaz ul Khaliq

ANKARA (AA) – Cambodia is set to receive the first shipment of coronavirus vaccine from China’s Sinopharm early February.

The Southeast Asian country will get the first 300,000 doses out of promised one million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, daily Khmer Times reported on Wednesday.

The country’s Prime Minister Hun Sen will receive the first dose to launch the vaccine campaign in the kingdom with a nearly 16.5 million people.

“I wish to announce that the first injection of the vaccine will be given to me. I must be on the front line, which has been my normal habit for decades,” Sen had said earlier this month.

Cambodia’s Health Ministry said the Chinese vaccine has a 79.34% efficacy.

A person will have to receive two jabs of the vaccine for it to be effective.

The ministry spokeswoman Or Vandine said: “At least 223 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine have been already distributed to many countries, including in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Europe.”

China on Wednesday confirmed that three of its vaccine manufacturers had applied for the global COVAX initiative led by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Sinovac, Sinopharm, and CanSinoBio submitted applications to join the initiative that aims to provide COVID-19 vaccines to poor countries, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying told a news conference.

“Chinese COVID-19 vaccine producers are in close communication with the WHO on application of pre-qualification for emergency use listing,” she added.

Apart from these three, there are 12 more vaccine candidates being developed in China.

Orders for COVID-19 vaccines made in China have been placed by at least 18 countries – Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Ukraine, Senegal, Hungary, Peru, Serbia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Argentina, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates.