The Royal Air Maroc (RAM) aircraft carrying the vaccines, connecting Mumbai and Casablanca, is expected to arrive at approximately 1:30 p.m.
Agadir – A new batch of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, sent from India to Morocco, will arrive in Casablanca on Thursday, February 11, health ministry sources told international media.
The Royal Air Maroc (RAM) aircraft carrying the vaccines, connecting Mumbai and Casablanca, is set to arrive at approximately 1:30 p.m. Reuters reports that Morocco will receive four million doses of the vaccine.
India’s Serum Institute (SII) manufactures the AstraZeneca vaccine. SII is the largest producer of vaccines across the world.
This will be Morocco’s second batch of AstraZeneca’s vaccine following the two million doses that arrived from India on January 25. Two days later, on January 27, Morocco received half a million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, produced in China.
As of February 10, Morocco has seen a total of 476,689 COVID-19 infections, with a fatality rate of 1.8% and a recovery rate of 95.8%.
In its daily update on Wednesday, health authorities announced that Morocco’s vaccinated population reached 746,116. As part of the country’s national vaccination campaign, the government aims to vaccinate at least 33 million people in order to achieve collective immunity.
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Morocco’s government announced in November 2020 that it had secured 65 million doses of vaccines. But it is still unclear when the country will receive all the doses it has ordered.
In January, Morocco’s Head of Government Saad Eddine El Othmani blamed the uncertainty surrounding the country’s vaccination campaign on obstacles to securing vaccinations.
“At the international level, everyone is asking for vaccines and orders have reached more than one billion doses. Manufacturers do not have the ability to keep up with all the orders at once,” El Othmani said.
Parallel to the launch of Morocco’s national vaccination campaign on January 28 with AstraZeneca’s vaccine, the country began to see a steady decline of COVID-19 cases.
