Kuwait City: On Tuesday, Kuwait's Ministry of Health authorised the emergency use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, KUNA reported.
The Assistant Undersecretary for Drug and Food Control, Dr. Abdullah Al Bader, said in a statement that the authorisation came after the Ministry conducted a thorough review of the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.
The decision comes after the Minister of Health, Dr. Basel Al Sabah, announced earlier this week that Kuwait has contracted US pharmaceutical companies to supply both the Johnson & Johnson and Moderna vaccines.
So far, Kuwait has given emergency authorisation for use of the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
Mix and match
On Sunday evening, Dr. Basel said during an interview on Kuwait TV that Kuwait is planning to give residents the option of taking Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine even if they have taken Oxford-AstraZeneca as their first jab if there was a further delay in receiving the documents for the third shipment of Oxford doses that arrived in the country.
The third shipment, from Russia, arrived in Kuwait on May 10 and it has not been handed over to the Ministry of Health as some documents to authenticate the cargo have not yet been received.
The documents are expected to arrive on June 8, as per the Ministry of Health’s statement. Once the certificates are authenticated, Dr.Basel said that they are planning on vaccinating 200,000 people within 10 day across 30 vaccination centres.
