Covid Vaccination Starts for Elderly, Disabled Citizens

The Health Ministry announced that 20,000 of the country’s elderly and the disabled will be vaccinated against Covid-19 in the second phase of the national inoculation program.
“We’re hoping to immunize top priority groups by late September,” Health Ministry Saeed Namaki was quoted as saying by ISNA on Tuesday.
Iran is planning to vaccinate 50-54 million people by March 2022, according to the spokesman of National Coronavirus Taskforce, Alireza Raeisi. 
“We’ll start to receive local vaccines by April. First, the vaccine developed by Pasteur Institute of Iran and then starting June, CoV Barkat will become available,” he said.
The official pointed out that CoV Barkat, manufactured by Execution of Imam Khomeini’r Order, can roll out 15 million shots a month, helping Iran inoculate as many as 54 million over the next year.
Iran is expecting its first shipment of Chinese-developed vaccine Sinopharm this week, enough to vaccinate 125,000 against the contagion. 
Raeisi said, “We’ll inject a majority of the elderly and those with preexisting health conditions with COVAX’s AstraZeneca vaccine.”
COVAX is a global initiative backed by the World Health Organization aiming to secure fair access to coronavirus vaccines for low-income nations.
Some 8,100 Iranians contracted Covid-19 within one day, pushing the total tally to 1.615 million, Spokeswoman of Health Ministry Sima Sadat Lari said.
“Over the past 24 hours, 69 Covid-19 patients lost their lives and the national death toll reached 59,899,” she added.
Lari said more than 1.37 million have recovered from the respiratory illness and 3,720 are hospitalized in ICU units. 
“Iran has administered 10.73 million diagnostic tests to identify infected cases,” she said.
Worldwide, coronavirus cases rose to 113.6 million on Friday and the number of fatalities crossed 2.5 million.