Vietnam Airlines proposes to join in Covid-19 vaccine delivery
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Regarding the initiation, Vietnam Airlines stressed that it has prepared all necessary sources to meet the sternest requirements on delivering vaccines by air. In particular, the air carrier has set a special unit to get ready to conduct the mission once the competent authorities require, VTC News reported.
Currently, Vietnam Airlines has a full range of logistics services, modern cold storage, professionally trained manpower, and a comprehensive process of transporting frozen goods meeting international standards. Vietnam Airlines is also ready to launch a cool container service to move the vaccines.
"These are particularly important conditions in shipping COVID-19 vaccines, as vaccines require low storage temperatures. Failure to respond well to storage temperatures can affect the quality and effectiveness of the vaccines" ", Vietnam Airlines stressed.
According to Vietnam Airlines, the company has many years of experience in transportation medical products such as medicines, surgical equipment, organs for transplant ... even in a very urgent situation of the time. The company has made dozens of flights to transport organs such as heart, liver, kidney, cornea ... to patients who need urgent transplantation surgery in extremely strict storage conditions, with time pressure in minutes and length of transport. up to thousands of kilometers between provinces across the country.
Last year, the Chairman of Bamboo Airways Trinh Van Quyet also said that the air carrier would do its best to transport the COVID-19 vaccine to Vietnam if they were approved by the regulator.
The first doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines have arrived Wednesday afternoon at Tan Son Nhat International Airport, HCM City, VNA reported.
Vietnamese Deputy Health Minister Truong Quoc Cuong and Emily Hamblin, Consul General in HCM City, each holding their respective country’s flags, and representatives from the importer, Vietnam Vaccine JSC (VNVC), were present at the airport to welcome the delivery of 117,600 doses.
The vaccine order costs over 12 billion VND (US$520,000), the import fee is waived and VAT of only 5 percent is applied, according to the HCM City Customs Department.
This is a part of the initial order of 204,000 which was given import emergency approval by the health ministry, after a surge in community outbreaks in the last 27 days.
VNVC has signed a contract with AstraZeneca last November to procure a total of 30 million doses that will be delivered in phases throughout 2021.
This is in addition to about 30 million doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines that will be made available to Việt Nam via the WHO-led Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative.
The containers, delivered on a Korean Air flight KE351 (using Boeing cargo plane B77L) from Seoul, South Korea (SK Bioscience is one of the three global producers of the AstraZeneca vaccines), were disinfected then transported to a specialized cold chain storage facility run by VNVC.
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