“Two hundred thousand from Sinopharm are due very early next week.”

The announcement was made by Foreign and CARICOM Affairs Minister, Dr. Amery Browne during Friday’s debate on the Mid-Year budget review in the Senate. 

This is the first commercial shipment of Sinopharm vaccines to T&T- the first shipment of 100,000 doses in May came as a gift from China, after talks between Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley and China’s Xi Jinping.

The Foreign Affairs Minister said the procurement of vaccines remains a top priority for government. “By the end of today (Friday), and I say that specifically, we would have had over 250,000 doses of covid19 vaccines in our country. This is an ongoing and aggressive acquisition effort, involving many persons both in TT and outside of TT,” he said. 

Earlier this week, on Wednesday, Finance Minister Colm Imbert said while starting the Mid-Year budget debate in the House of Representatives, that government had set aside TT $107m for vaccines- of which more than $70m in payments had already been made. 

This, he said, was enough to vaccinate 1.2 million people, or 85% of the population.