Taiwan took delivery of 656,000 doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine purchased from the vaccine maker on Thursday afternoon, the second batch of vaccines it received that day.
The shipment of the vaccine, which will expire on Jan. 31, 2022, landed at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport at around 3:10 p.m. on a China Airlines flight that departed from Bangkok Thursday morning.
According to the CECC, the vaccine doses were transported to a designated cold chain warehouse and sealed for inspection by Taiwan’s Food and Drug Administration, the standard procedure before the vaccine can be distributed for use.
The latest delivery is part of a 10 million dose order Taiwan signed with the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company on Oct. 30, 2020. To date, 5.02 million doses of that order have been delivered, the CECC said.
As of Thursday, Taiwan had obtained approximately 10.52 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses from the manufacturer, the global vaccine sharing initiative COVAX, as well as other nations in the form of donations, CECC data showed.
Taiwan also received 540,000 Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT) vaccine doses on Thursday morning.
Asked at the CECC press briefing on Thursday if the country will receive more vaccines in the coming days, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (???) said it is possible another batch of the Moderna vaccine could arrive in the country.
Meanwhile, Terry Gou (???), founder of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., which is globally known as Foxconn, said in a Facebook post Thursday that another BNT vaccine shipment totaling about 600,000 doses, is expected to arrive in Taiwan on Friday.
In July, Hon Hai’s Yonglin Charity and Education Foundation, along with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, ordered a total of 15 million doses of BNT vaccines from the German manufacturer.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel