Vietnam has given the first shot of AstraZeneca vaccine to more than 32,000 people, the Ministry of Health said in a report on Sunday.

An additional 1,446 people were vaccinated against COVID-19 on Saturday, the health ministry elaborated.

A total of 32,361 had been inoculated by 4:00 pm on that day.

They were medical staff directly treating coronavirus patients, health workers doing contact tracing and sampling tasks, and other frontline workers.

The Expanded Program on Immunization, which provides free immunization to children under one year old to protect them from six common and highly fatal infectious diseases in Vietnam, has recorded postvaccinal reactions in those inoculated against COVID-19.

The reactions signified the body’s building immunity against the coronavirus, the program said.

AstraZeneca is the only vaccine administered in Vietnam at the moment.

The Southeast Asian country received the first-ever shipment of 117,600 AstraZeneca jabs on February 24.

Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long said on Wednesday 1.3 million AstraZeneca shots will arrive in Vietnam by the end of this month and be distributed throughout the country.

Vietnam is negotiating the purchase of vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and the maker of Russia’s Sputnik V, the minister said, adding that it may be able to buy 30 million Pfizer-BioNTech doses this year.

The Ministry of Health received 1,000 Sputnik V shots as a donation from Russia on Tuesday, said Dang Viet Hung, director of the ministry’s Department of International Cooperation.

The government has said it already secured 60 million AstraZeneca jabs via direct purchases and the COVAX vaccine-sharing scheme.

Vietnam expects to acquire 150 million vaccine doses in total this year.

Vietnam’s first domestically developed COVID-19 vaccine, called Nanocovax, is expected to be available by the fourth quarter of this year and put into use in 2022, Reuters reported.

The nation recorded zero COVID-19 cases on Sunday morning, with 2,572 patients, 2,198 recoveries, and 35 deaths having been documented so far.

Authorities are quarantining 37,600 people who either got into close contact with infected patients or entered the country from virus-hit regions.

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