A plane landed at the Beirut airport, an AFP correspondent
reported, with authorities saying it was carrying 28,500 doses of
Pfizer/BioNTech flown in from Belgium.
The shipment was the first after the World Bank allocated
$34 million to inoculate two million of Lebanon’s six million inhabitants.
Caretaker health minister Hamad Hassan was on the tarmac to
welcome the plane and expressed great “relief”.
“It’s a dream being realised today thanks to the support of
our UN and international partners,” he told reporters,
“The vaccine will reach all Lebanese citizens across the
country,” as well as Syrian and Palestinian refugees and other residents, he
promised.
Lebanon has been under strict lockdown since mid-January,
after an unprecedented spike in cases blamed on holiday gatherings that forced
overwhelmed hospitals to turn away patients.
Vaccination rollout is set to start on Sunday.
Health workers will receive their first dose at the Rafik
Hariri Hospital, the country’s main public hospital tackling the Covid-19
outbreak, the American University of Beirut Medical Centre, and Saint George
Orthodox Hospital.
“The best gift one can ask for on Valentine’s Day,” wrote
the director of the Rafik Hariri Hospital, Firas Abiad, on Twitter.
Prime Minister Hassan Diab, 61, is also to be vaccinated,
his office said.
Under Lebanon’s vaccination plan, medical staff and those
over the age of 75 are to receive the jab first.
In total Lebanon hopes to receive around six million vaccine
doses, including two million from Pfizer/BioNTech and another 2.7 million via
the international Covax distribution programme.
Half a million people in Lebanon have signed up to receive a
vaccine, a health ministry official said, although many are hesitant to get the
jab.
Of 500 people surveyed by private think-tank Information
International, 31 percent said they would get vaccinated, 38 percent said they
would rather not, and another 31 percent were undecided.
Lebanon was already in the throes of its worst economic
crisis in decades when Covid-19 hit, and the situation has been exacerbated
after a massive blast at Beirut’s port in August killed more than 200 people
and destroyed large parts of the capital.
The World Bank and the International Federation of Red Cross
and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) are to monitor the rollout, they said in a
statement Friday.
They aim to “ensure fair, broad, and fast access to Covid-19
vaccines to help save lives and support economic recovery”, World Bank regional
director Saroj Kumar Jha said.
Lebanon says 334,086 people have caught coronavirus since
February 2020, of whom 3,915 have died.
0 comments:
Post a Comment