A total of 135,690 AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines arrived in Rwanda from Malta on Friday morning.

The vaccines arrived in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, on a seven-hour Air Malta charter flight. It was the longest non-stop flight ever operated by the airline.

Rwanda has so far vaccinated just 15% of its population. It has received around 3.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines – 1.1 million of these from the COVAX Facility (an international collaboration of donor countries), 108,000 from the Africa Centres for Disease Control’s Africa Vaccine Acquisition Trust and 2.1 million from bilateral agreements.

Video: Air Malta

Malta also shipped 40,000 vaccines and 40,000 virus test kits to Libya in August.

Speaking in parliament in February, Health Minister Chris Fearne said Malta had secured double the number of COVID-19 vaccines needed to inoculate the entire country and planned on donating or selling its surplus jabs.

The World Health Organisation has urged member states to donate virus jabs to countries that do not have any, before going on to administer booster jabs to their populations.

Video: Air Malta

Although Malta is currently administering booster jabs to the vulnerable sectors of its population, it is currently using vaccines manufactured by Pfizer/BioNTech.

At the end of September Malta said it was recognising vaccination certificates issued by Rwanda. 

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