Kenya Receives 1.025 Million Doses of COVID-19 Vaccine from COVAX

Kenya has received 1.025 million doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine from the COVAX facility.

A Qatar Airways flight QR1341 carrying the first consignment of the COVID-19 vaccine landed at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in Nairobi at 11:23 pm on Tuesday.

The delivery was received by top government officials led by Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe, who indicated that the vaccination process will begin with healthcare workers, then police, and teachers.

“The country has 400,000 health care workers and they shall be the first ones to be vaccinated. We need a priority list because we cannot vaccinate everybody at the same time,” Kagwe said at JKIA.

The vaccines were brought in as part of the COVAX, a global initiative that was created to ensure that low and middle-income countries have fair access to vaccines.

The jabs were ferried to a government storage facility in Kitengela, Kajiado County, from where they will be distributed across the country. The vaccines are expected to land at county hospitals by Friday.

“The vaccines will be distributed across all the counties where it will be rolled out to regional hospitals and down to level 3 and level 2 hospitals,” CS Kagwe added.

Kagwe described the arrival of the vaccine in the country as an exciting moment for Kenya, adding that vaccination will be purely voluntary.

“We have been fighting the pandemic with rubber bullets but what we have received is an equivalent to machine guns and tanks,” Kagwe added.

“There are those who would wish not to be vaccinated but we hope it will be a majority of them willing to be vaccinated.”