ZURICH (Reuters) – Switzerland will donate up to 15 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to other countries by the middle of this year, having secured more than enough to cover its own population of around 8.7 million, the government said on Wednesday.
Around 34 million doses of vaccine will be available to Switzerland in 2022 – 20 million in the first half of the year and 14 million in the second, the cabinet said.
The country has already lifted almost all coronavirus pandemic restrictions as fears waned that a spike in infections fuelled by the Omicron variant would overwhelm the health care system.
“The priority is for the donation of vaccines that are surplus to requirements to run via the multilateral mechanism of the COVAX Initiative,” the government added in a statement.
Romania on Wednesday said it will donate 1.1 million AstraZeneca vaccines to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria and Libya, while the World Health Organization said it has set up a hub in South Korea to train low- and middle-income countries to produce their own vaccines.
In June 2021 Switzerland decided to donate 4 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. In December, it delayed the delivery of a million doses of Moderna vaccine so that the COVAX Initiative could benefit directly from freed-up production capacity.
The government also said it would agree purchase guarantees with manufacturers of drugs to treat Sars-CoV-2 so that people with immune deficiency would have access to them.
(Reporting by Michael Shields; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
