MALABO, June 18 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A batch of 500,000 doses of a Chinese vaccine against covid-19 was sent on Thursday from the Chinese capital, Beijing, to Equatorial Guinea, announced the Ministry of Health in the African country.
According to a publication posted on social networks, the doses of the BBIBP-CorV vaccine, developed by the Chinese state laboratory Sinopharm, were acquired by the Government of Equatorial Guinea.
The ministry said that 17 percent of the population of Equatorial Guinea is already vaccinated against covid-19.
Equatorial Guinea is the third country in Africa with the highest percentage of the population already vaccinated, having surpassed the African Union’s goal of immunizing 10 percent of the population by September, the ministry said.
In February, Equatorial Guinea had already received a batch of 100,000 doses of the BBIBP-CorV vaccine, donated by the Chinese government.
Part of the doses were used to vaccinate the approximately 1,500 Chinese citizens living in the African country, a campaign that ended in early May.
The campaign in Equatorial Guinea was part of the “Spring Seeds” operation, which Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi publicly announced on March 7, to vaccinate its citizens abroad.
China also announced, on the 8th of the same month, the end of the campaign to immunize almost 10,000 Chinese living in Angola, with the Sinopharm vaccine.
Operation “Sementes da Primavera” has also been launched in Mozambique and Timor-Leste.
According to the African Union Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Equatorial Guinea recorded a total number of 120 deaths associated with coronavirus and 8,662 cases of infection.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 3,835,238 deaths worldwide, resulting from more than 176.9 million cases of infection.
The disease is transmitted by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China. — NNN-AGENCIES
