Turkey to receive more batches of Pfizer jab

ISTANBUL

Turkey will receive 12 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNTech by the end of next week, the country’s health minister has said.

Fahrettin Koca said he spoke with Uğur Şahin, the co-founder of CEO of Germany-based BioNTech, earlier this week and that Şahin confirmed that they obtained export permission for 12 million doses of the injection.

Deliveries will be made in batches starting this week, Koca added, noting that this would help the country to boost its vaccination drive during summer.

“If we have a total of 30 million doses of the BioNTech jab, we can widen the scope of the inoculations to cover more age groups by the end of the month,” he said.

In May, the minister said Turkey had signed deals to receive 120 million doses of BioNTech, 100 million doses of Sinovac and 50 million doses of Sputnik vaccines.

“We will push the means to the fullest in order to turn June into a month of vaccine mobilization,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on May 31.

Erdoğan underlined that the government was preparing intensively to get the highest possible amount of different vaccines for which contracts were signed and administer them to people quickly.

Turkey has already administered nearly 29.2 million doses of COVID-19 jabs since it rolled out its inoculation program on Jan. 14.

To date, some 17 million people have received their first dose of the vaccine, while more than 12.5 million have been fully inoculated.