New Zealand Orders 8.5 Million Doses Of Additional COVID-19 Vaccine To Vaccinate Its Citizens

Vaksin PfizerBioNTech. (Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Secretary of Defense)

JAKARTA - New Zealand authorities plan to purchase additional supplies of the COVID-19 vaccine from Prizer BioNTech to meet the country's vaccine needs.

This was conveyed by the Prime Minister (PM) of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, Monday, March 8 local time. She explained that the New Zealand Government had signed an agreement to buy an additional 8.5 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, to vaccinate more than 4 million people.

He said the additional vaccine ordered could arrive in New Zealand in the second half of this year. With these additions, New Zealand has a total of 10 million doses of vaccine on order.

"This brings our total Pfizer order to 10 million doses, or enough for 5 million people, to get the two injections needed to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19", New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in a statement.

The original government agreement with Pfizer was 1.5 million doses, enough to vaccinate 750.000 people.

Ardern said the decision to make the Pfizer vaccine the country's main vaccine provider was taken after it was proven to be about 95% effective in preventing symptomatic infections.

New Zealand kicked off the national rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine with Pfizer-BioNTech last month. It is hoped that all New Zealand residents will be vaccinated by the end of this year.

New Zealand is one of the countries that has successfully handled the COVID-19 pandemic, compared to other developed countries. The country only has positive cases of COVID-19 in the 2.000-ish, and a death rate of only 26 cases.

This condition was supported by the swift decision of the New Zealand Government to close all border areas, carry out a lockdown and carry out COVID-19 tracking quickly.