MANILA, Philippines — While most Asian countries have already started vaccinating their citizens against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, a report by market and data consumer company Statista noted a slowdown in Asia’s vaccination drive.
Katharina Buchholz, Statista’s senior data journalist, said in a report on Wednesday that the “vaccinations against the coronavirus have progressed quite sluggishly in Asia.”
Citing the data collected by Our World in Data, a research project at the University of Oxford, Buchholz detailed that the “highest achievers” so far in Asia’s vaccination race are micro and island states like Seychelles, the Maldives, or Singapore.
As of April 3 to 6, around 26 doses per 100 people in Singapore have already been administered.
Meanwhile, China and India — both of which have developed their own COVID-19 vaccines — are not far behind.
“China has been instrumental in giving the Seychelles vaccination campaign a head start and is also supplying Indonesia. Singapore, like Malaysia, relied on the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine,” said Buchholz.
“India has not exported its local Covaxin variety but has helped neighbors and allies out significantly with its locally produced AstraZeneca vaccine, dubbed Covishield. The export drive has led to a quick start of vaccination campaigns and comparably high vaccination levels in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as well,” she added.
The firm likewise mentioned the slow progress among Asian countries which have been considered “late starters” in administering vaccines to portions of their population.
“Among them are Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan, where vaccination campaigns only started at the end of February and have progressed slowly,” the report read.
Vaccination drive in Asia
Based on the April 7 data compiled by the Our World in Data through the Johns Hopkins University data, over 300 million vaccine doses have already been administered in Asia.
To be exact, Asia has administered 317,910,039 doses or 44.78 percent of the total 709,929,564 doses administered in the world.
“This is counted as a single dose, and may not equal the total number of people vaccinated, depending on the specific dose regime (e.g. people receive multiple doses),” the organization noted.
The data likewise showed that China remains the leading Asian country in terms of the total number of vaccine doses administered. As of April 7, it has administered 149.07 million doses.
It is followed by India, which has administered 90.20 million single doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Meanwhile, according to the National Task Force (NTF) Against COVID-19, the Philippines has administered 922,898 vaccine doses as of April 6.
VACCINE ROLLOUT UPDATE
As of 6 April 2021, 2,670 vaccination sites are conducting COVID-19 vaccination in various sites across all regions.
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— National Task Force Against COVID19 (@ntfcovid19ph) April 7, 2021
India topped the recent ranking of Asian countries with the most share of people who received at least a single dose of vaccine and those who were fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
The Our World in Data’s charts bared that out of the 1.390 billion current population of India, 78.76 million already got a jab of the available COVID-19 vaccine in the country.
On the other hand, there are 11.14 million in India who received all doses prescribed by the vaccination protocol.
It should be noted, however, that the organization had no available data for China and several Asian countries on these specific categories.
In the Philippines, NTF COVID-19 detailed that 872,213 Filipinos were already inoculated with a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine, and 50,685 individuals are already fully vaccinated.
Acquired vaccines per country
Our World in Data also showed that most Asian countries have acquired and/or administered the COVID-19 vaccine developed by British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
Several countries in the continent have also secured and obtained doses of vaccines from US-based multinational pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer and German biotechnology company BioNTech.
Other vaccines such as Moderna’s mRNA-1273, Sinovac’s CoronaVac, Gamaleya Research Institutes’s Sputnik V vaccine, Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, and Sinopharm have also been distributed among Asian countries.
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