Tunisia receives first major vaccine delivery

Tunisia received its first major delivery of coronavirus vaccine doses on Tuesday, almost a month later than expected, paving the way for the start of its vaccination campaign this week.

Health Minister Faouzi Mehdi was on site for the delivery of 30,000 doses of Sputnik V to Tunis, AFP journalists said.

The government had previously announced that it initially expected to receive more than 93,000 doses of Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca / Oxford jabs from mid-February, but delivery under the Covax program led by the UN has been delayed.

Health workers will have priority for Sputnik V jabs, which will be distributed to vaccination centers across the country.

Tunisia is expected to start vaccinations on Saturday, Mehdi told AFP, and aims to eventually vaccinate half of its approximately 11 million inhabitants.

Tunis bought a total of 500,000 doses of Sputnik V, added the outgoing Minister of Health.

The country has changed health ministers three times since the start of the pandemic and is locked in a political stalemate between the government and the president.

Last month, lawmakers revealed that the presidency received 1,000 vaccines – donated by the United Arab Emirates – in October, sparking an uproar.

The government announced an investigation, while the presidency denied that President Kais Saied or his relatives had received the vaccines, which it said had been sent to military health services.

Meanwhile, the 93,600 doses of Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine are expected to arrive in the next few days, health ministry official Ines Ayadi told a private radio station on Tuesday.

She said some 600,000 AstraZeneca vaccines are expected to follow by the end of the month.

A military plane is expected to fly to China to collect 100,000 doses of a Chinese vaccine that Beijing has pledged to give to Tunisia, Ayadi added.

Tunisia has officially registered more than 238,000 new cases of coronavirus and more than 8,200 deaths.

When it comes to vaccinations, it lags behind its regional peers, Morocco and Algeria, which both started their vaccination campaigns at the end of January.