Nearly 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered in Vietnam

After one year implementing the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, Vietnam has administered nearly 197.5 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines on people living in the country, becoming one of the six countries with the highest vaccination coverage in the world.

On March 8,2021, the first hundreds of AstraZeneca vaccine were given to frontline female workers at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in the northern province of Hai Duong, then the epicentre of a serious COVID-19 outbreak in the country, after a successful 2020 where caseload and deaths remained impressively low in Vietnam.

In the first half of 2021, amid a critical shortage of COVID-19 vaccines on a global scale, the health ministry conservatively estimated that only by the end of the first quarter of 2022 would Vietnam be able to secure the 150 million doses, via order and donation, that were needed to vaccinate 75 per cent of the roughly 98 million people in Vietnam.

However, the fourth wave of infections that began in HCM City and the southern regions between June and October pushed vaccine diplomacy into overdrive.

Leaders of the State and Government and the health ministry were actively involved in vaccine procurement, calling for donations and trying to get access to many types of vaccines from different partners and manufacturers, in order to get them to people as soon as possible.

As of March 6, 2022, nearly 100 percent of the adult population in the country has now received at least one dose of vaccine, 98.7 percent are fully vaccinated and booster dose coverage is 38.4 percent.

The health ministry aims to complete the booster vaccine campaign in the first quarter of this year, allowing the country to further reopen in the new normal.

Almost all, 99 per cent, of children aged 12-17 years have received at least one dose of vaccine, while 93.8 percent have been fully inoculated. Vietnam will soon be rolling out vaccines to children aged 5-11 years, as well as studying the need for a fourth dose.

Despite a spike in cases in recent days, COVID-19 deaths in the country have remained stable, and the fatality-to-case ratio has even fallen to 0.1 percent as of March 3, 2022, from 0.9 per cent on February 1, 2022.