HCMC – The southern province of Dong Nai today, October 20, gave the green light to a plan to reduce the interval between two doses of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine to four weeks from the recommended 8-12 weeks.
People who got their first shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine four weeks ago can now take the second shot, according to the provincial chairman.
The provincial government tasked the local health authority with coordinating with the relevant agencies and local authorities to continue the vaccination rollout to ensure 100% of residents 18 and older in the province would be fully vaccinated.
According to the provincial Health Department, the province administered the first shot to over 2.5 million people at age 18 and above, meeting 101% of its target. Among them, over 980,000 are fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, it has yet to inoculate youths 12 to 17 years of age.
Phan Huy Anh Vu, head of the provincial health authority, said the Ministry of Health had allocated an additional 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca to the province the same day to administer the second shot to local residents.
As an industrial province, Dong Nai has a high demand for Covid vaccines to stabilize the daily lives of local residents and help production recover at the earliest. However, one of its obstacles in the vaccination drive is the shortage of syringes as the Covid vaccines were shipped to the province first and the syringes arrived later.
Accordingly, Vu asked the local authorities to proactively tap the local budget and raise funds from the private sector to purchase syringes for Covid vaccination, instead of waiting for the supply from the Health Ministry.
