23 Aug 2021; MEMO: The Egyptian government yesterday said it would not allow unvaccinated civil servants from accessing their places of work starting October.
"The decision is taken as part of government measures to prevent a fourth wave of the coronavirus," the Minister of Health, Hala Zayed, told reporters.
Zayed added that all civil servants at the education and higher education ministries would be "vaccinated before the end of September, in preparation for the start of the new academic year."
"A new shipment of Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be arriving in the coming days to facilitate the vaccination of post-university educational travelers," Zayed added, calling all citizens "to immediately register for vaccination."
She pointed out that the Egyptian Sinovac vaccine would be distributed across all health centres today, explaining that Egypt would produce "approximately 12.5 million doses of this vaccine locally while supplying some one million doses of the Pfizer vaccine in September."
"There will be no third dose given to medical care staff under the recommendations of the World Health Organisation," Zayed said.
The head of the health committee at the parliament, Ashraf Hatem, said recently that the vaccination would be "mandatory for all Egyptian citizens."
In May, the government announced that it had received a first shipment of raw materials needed to start manufacturing the China Sinovac vaccine locally. On 5 July, it said it had produced the first one million doses.
So far, a total of 286,168 have contracted the virus in Egypt, 16,663 of whom have died, and 235,635 others have recovered, according to the US' Worldometers.
