Iraq received 50,000 doses of vaccines from the Chinese laboratory Sinopharm on Monday evening, March 1, promising to administer them as of Tuesday in a country of 40 million inhabitants with ruined infrastructure caught in a second worrying wave of contamination. “We will start the vaccinations today“Assured Seif al-Badr, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health after announcing the arrival of vaccines,”a gift to the Iraqi people“, According to the Chinese Embassy.
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Even as the plane landed in Baghdad, the ministry said it had recommended another 2 million doses in Beijing. At the same time, too, he was launching an online vaccination appointment platform “free“. It was not working Tuesday morning, AFP journalists noted. For months, the authorities have been criticized for their management of the Covid in Iraq, whose borders are very porous with Iran, the country most affected in the Middle East by the Covid. At the same time, very few Iraqis comply with social distancing or wearing a mask, despite the lockdowns decreed.
If no Iraqi citizen has so far been vaccinated, two senior officials and a third, out of business, told AFP that in January they had already received one or two doses of “chinese vaccine“. They explained that one of the country’s most prominent politicians received a thousand doses through contacts in China, which he then distributed to many elected officials and government officials.
For the rest of the 40 million Iraqis, in a decades-long shortage of drugs, hospitals and doctors, Iraq should receive around 2 million doses of AstraZeneca via the Covax device intended in particular for underprivileged countries. Baghdad, which is going through the worst economic crisis in its history, claims to have also already ordered 1.5 million doses from Pfizer thanks to a loan from the World Bank.
A recent World Bank poll indicated that only 39% of the 10,000 Iraqis polled said they wanted to be vaccinated. As for the caregivers questioned, they were only 42% wanting to do so. To date, the country officially lists 699,088 contaminations, including 13,428 deaths.
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