Over 18% of Ireland’s population vaccinated against Covid-19

Dublin, April 6 (SocialNews.XYZ) Over 900,000 people in Ireland, or 18.5 per cent of the country's total population, have been partially or fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to the statistics released by the Irish Department of Health on Monday.

The department said in a statement that as of April 2, a total of 923,878 doses of Covid-19 vaccine had been administered in Ireland, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Of those who had been vaccinated, 655,292 people had received their first dose, while 268,586 people had received their second dose, it said.

Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said late last month that the government plans to have close to 3 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine administered in the country by the end of May and 6 million doses by the end of July.

The progress of the Irish government's vaccination program was repeatedly delayed in the first quarter of this year due to the supply shortage of the vaccines.

Currently three vaccines, namely Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Moderna, are being used in Ireland with Johnson & Johnson's single-shot vaccine to be available here soon.

To date, a total of 238,466 people in Ireland have been infected with Covid-19 and 4,718 of them have died from the virus, according to the Irish Department of Health.

As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in an increasing number of countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines.

Meanwhile, 269 candidate vaccines are still being developed -- 85 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the US, according to information released by the World Health Organization on April 2.

Source: IANS