Japan to donate millions more AstraZeneca vaccine doses across Asia

Japan will donate one million COVID-19 vaccine doses each to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand starting from next Thursday, said Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi on Friday.

Kyodo News reported that the Foreign Minister said that the country will also offer one million doses each to Taiwan and Vietnam, in addition to the batches of 1.24 million and one million shots provided to them, respectively, earlier in the month.

The decision to provide coronavirus vaccine developed AstraZeneca came after requests were made from the said countries and Taiwan.

"We took into account the infection situations of each applicant, the extent of vaccine shortages there and the nature of their relations with Japan before we decided on this provision," Motegi said.

Meanwhile, Japan will provide a total of about 11 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Pacific islands through the UN-backed COVAX global vaccine sharing program, Motegi said.

Japan has secured enough AstraZeneca vaccine doses for 60 million people and approved their use last month, it does not intend to use them immediately in public inoculation programmes due to rare cases of blood clots reported overseas.