Israel is sending 700,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses to South Korea in exchange for a future shipment of vaccines from South Korea to Israel.
Under the deal, Israel is to transfer the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines to South Korea in an effort to inoculate more of the Asian nation’s citizens this month. South Korea would then send the same number of doses to Israel as early as September, officials said.
“This is a win-win deal,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a statement.
Photo: AFP
The agreement would “reduce the holes” in the vaccine’s availability, he said.
Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency Commissioner Jung Eun-kyeong, South Korea’s top infectious disease expert, confirmed the deal.
She said the South Korean government would continue to pursue swap deals with other nations.
“We are expecting to have a sufficient number of vaccines during the fourth quarter while we proceed with our vaccination campaign,” Jung said.
Both nations are reporting a surge in new COVID-19 infections, with South Korea topping 700 new cases of COVID-19 for the fourth straight day yesterday. Israel reported the most new infections in three months, with the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 driving the trend.
Both governments are considering ways to curb the spread of the virus.
South Korea has so far administered first doses to 30 percent of its population. Israel has fully vaccinated nearly 5.3 million of its population of 9.3 million.
Bennett said the agreement, which he personally negotiated with Pfizer chief executive Albert Burla, is the first of its kind between Israel and another nation.
The Israeli vaccines still need to be tested after their arrival in South Korea, he added.
The deal comes a few weeks after the Palestinian Authority, which has limited autonomy over areas of the occupied West Bank, called off a deal to receive 1 million doses of vaccine from Israel.
The Palestinians said that the vaccines were too close to expiring and did not meet their standards.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS