A shipment of three million COVID-19 vaccine doses for children aged five to below 12 is expected to arrive in Vietnam by the end of this month.

Authorities in the country are conducting necessary procedures to procure 21.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine for children five to under 12 years old, according to a source close to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

The first batch of three million jabs is expected to be delivered in late March, while the next shipment will arrive in April, the source added.

The vaccination campaign for children in this age range will begin next month.

Sixth graders will be the first to receive the vaccine shots, followed by those in lower grades.

The inoculation drive will use Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, with each dose containing 10mcg of antigens, which is one-third of the dose for children aged 12 and older.

Vietnamese health experts quoted U.S. statistics as showing that the vaccine has helped lower the probability of severe illness in children aged five to below 12 by 70 to 90 percent.

No case of serious side effects such as myocarditis and pericarditis has been recorded.

According to the Ministry of Health, the number of COVID-19 infections in the country has soared over the past month, especially among unvaccinated children.

As of Saturday, health workers in Vietnam had administered over 197.2 million vaccine doses.

Above 180.2 million doses have been given to the adult demographic of the country’s 98 million people.

About 17 million shots have been injected into children aged 12-17, including 8.7 million first doses and 8.2 second jabs.

Vietnam has documented 4,232,520 patients and 40,726 pathogen-related deaths since the COVID-19 pandemic first hit the country in early 2020.

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