TEHRAN - South Korea will soon offer 1 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to Iran, on humanitarian grounds, to help address its vaccine shortage, Seoul's foreign ministry said Monday.

The vaccines will be delivered to Iran on Wednesday to help the nation's COVID-19 vaccination campaign, the ministry said, Yonhap reported.

As per contracts signed with international manufacturers, some 100 million doses of coronavirus vaccine should be imported by the end of 2021, Nasser Riyahi, the head of the Association of Medicine Importers, said in August.

The COVAX facility has pledged to provide Iran with 16.8 million doses of the vaccine, IRIB quoted Riyahi as saying.

Russia has also signed contracts to export 30-50 million doses of the vaccine to Iran, but it has reneged on the promise, he noted.

“It had been planned to import 50 million doses of Chinese vaccine from Sinopharm, but to date around half of the amount has been delivered.”

World Health Organization (WHO) representative to Iran Jaffar Hussain has said that the process of vaccination against coronavirus in Iran is progressing well.

Iran has recently accelerated its vaccination rollout and is now administering in the range of one million doses per day. So far, about 40 percent of the population has received both doses.

MG