South Korea has signed contracts with Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical company Janssen to import Covid-19 vaccines, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said at a news conference on Thursday.
Under the contract, South Korea will import doses for 6 million people from Janssen, 2 million more than announced in early December. Vaccination with Janssen doses will begin in the second quarter of 2021, added Chung.
South Korea will also import doses of vaccine for 10 million people from Pfizer in the third quarter of 2021, said Chung. Chung added that the government is making every possible effort to introduce the Pfizer vaccine in the second quarter of next year.
South Korea previously announced that it had signed a contract with vaccine developer AstraZeneca to import vaccines for 10 million people from the first quarter of 2021. The government said it would also import vaccine doses for 10 million people from Moderna and additional doses for 10 million people through the Covax Facility.
South Korea has about 52 million inhabitants.
The situation in South Korea: The East Asian country recorded 955 local cases and 30 imported from Covid-19 on Wednesday, of which 644 were from the Seoul metropolitan area, the Korean Disease Prevention and Control Agency (KDCA) said in a press release. On thursday. Another 17 deaths were reported on Wednesday.
The latest figures bring the total number of cases since the beginning of the pandemic to 53,533, including 756 deaths.