A part of the 500 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that the U.S. pledged to donate to poor nations will be distributed to Ukraine through COVAX, according to Kristina Kvien, chargé d’Affaires of the United States in Ukraine.
Moreover, the U.S. government development agency USAID will take care of the delivery and storage of the vaccines. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine requires transportation and storage at very low temperatures, which requires an infrastructure that is largely absent in Ukraine.
Kvien didn’t specify when the vaccines will come to Ukraine or how many doses there will be.
COVAX is an international program that provides COVID-19 vaccines to poor nations. The U.S. is the largest donor to the program.
COVAX has allocated a total of 16 million doses to Ukraine, which is enough to fully vaccinate 8 million Ukrainians.
Read also: Ukraine got 5 million doses of vaccine so far, 8 million more to come in July
Out of that amount, the international initiative has already supplied Ukraine with 2.1 million doses, half of which were Pfizer and half were AstraZeneca.
Vaccination in Ukraine began in late February. By July 5, only 898,311 people out of some 42 million that live in Ukraine were fully vaccinated.
