NewsDesk  @infectiousdiseasenews

In February of this year, the Royal Government of Cambodia launched its national vaccination campaign against COVID-19.

Public domain image courtesy of Lisa Ferdinando, U.S. Department of Defense

The stated goal at the time was to vaccinate 10 million adults by the end of 2021.

According to a Phnom Penh Post report today, it appears they are achieving their goals. The report states– Cambodia has so far vaccinated over 97 per cent of the adult population of 10 million. The country has also inoculated nearly 1.7 million children, or 86 per cent of 12-17 age group of nearly two million.

Since the onset of large-scale community transmission of COVID-19 in February 2021, the vaccination strategy adopted a geographical based roll-out, which prioritized vaccination in areas and cities at high risk for transmission, while gradually rolling-out vaccination to the rest of the country.

Despite the constrained global supply of COVID-19 vaccines, the Royal Government has been able to secure, through bilateral procurement, COVAX and donations, a pipeline of COVID-19 vaccines to meet its target. To date a total of 17,356,000 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been received in Cambodia and more are expected in the coming months.

Currently, Cambodia uses COVID-19 vaccines Sinovac, Sinopharm and AstraZeneca/Covishield which have obtained WHO approvals , with upcoming plans to include the Janssen (Johnson&Johnson) vaccine to its country vaccine portfolio.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Cambodia has reported 98,842 cumulative COVID-19 cases, including 2028 deaths.

During the past month, the Kingdom has reported 13,922 new cases. This compares to their neighbors Vietnam and Thailand, which has reported 333,669 and 489,764 new cases in the past 28 days, respectively.

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