Vaccination Drive to Gain Momentum

President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday said Iran’s vaccination drive will pick up speed starting this week and could reach half a million inoculations per day.
“A great project began today and more people, compared to previous weeks, will start to get vaccinated,” the president was quoted as saying by his website in the meeting of the National Coronavirus Headquarters.
According to the top official, Iran is prepared to administer 400,000 to 500,000 injections on a daily basis. “This will raise hope, build immunity and reduce the death rate,” Rouhani said.
The country’s sluggish vaccination drive in recent weeks had sparked criticism from the public. The arrival of some two million jabs over the past days is sure to boost the ongoing vaccine rollout.
Noting the recent rise in vaccine imports, Alireza Raeisi, spokesman for the NCH, said even more jabs will be delivered this week and over the coming weeks.

The official announced that starting Monday, people over the age of 68 are eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine. 
Since the start of the slow vaccination drive in late February, 4.592 million have received the first dose of a coronavirus vaccine and 2.134 million have been fully vaccinated, some 2.5% of the population.
Iran has in total administered 6.726 million shots.
It has been vaccinating its population with some eight million vaccines imported since February: Russia’s Sputnik V (1.1 million), AstraZeneca doses manufactured by South Korea and Italy (2.152 million), China’s Sinopharm (1.650 million), India’s Covaxin (125,000) and 4.056 million “foreign” vaccines (most likely Chinese), as per the Customs Administration’s report released on Saturday.
The country has recently began using its homegrown Covid-19 vaccines to ramp up vaccine availability.

Delta Alert

Following Saturday’s NCH meeting, Raeisi said that the Delta variant, first detected in India, is spreading in 25 of Iran’s 31 provinces.
Noting that many nations around the world are currently tackling the Delta variant, Raeisi said, “The variant’s foot track is present in Iran as well and it’s transmitting fast.”
Rouhani also pointed out that the fifth wave of the pandemic has hit Iran and sounded the alarm over the new mutation. “Unauthorized entry points facilitated the variant’s arrival into the country.”
Iran began monitoring its south and east borders after the Delta variant caused a spike in hospitalizations and deaths in India in early spring.
Despite the authorities’ best efforts, the Delta variant has now placed 143 cities on red alert and 176 are color-coded as orange.
Iran has once again reinstated strict measures to curb the outbreak, closing down most non-essential businesses and banning travel to and from high risk “red” and “orange” zones.
The Health Ministry reported 151 new fatalities and over 11,600 infections on Saturday, taking the national death toll to 85,694 and the case tally to 3.355 million.
Worldwide Covid-19 cases rose to 186.9 million on Saturday and fatalities caused by the viral infection crossed the four million mark.