Japan will donate a still-undetermined amount of AstraZeneca COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) vaccines to at least five Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines.
The Foreign Ministry in Tokyo made this announcement on Tuesday as it initially aimed to deliver one million doses of AstraZeneca to Vietnam following the surge of COVID-19 cases in that country.

In Manila, Japanese Ambassador Koshikawa Kazuhiko announced on social media that the Philippines will receive its share of the vaccine donations from Japan “at the soonest possible time”.
“Glad to be the bearer of good news today. Japan will donate AstraZeneca vaccines to the Philippines, and we’ll make sure to deliver them at the soonest possible time so no one gets left behind this pandemic,” Koshikawa said.
Since February this year, the Philippines received over 12 million various brands of vaccines such as Sinovac from China, Sputnik from the Russian Federation, AstraZeneca, and Pfizer BioNTech from the Covax facility.
Last week, Japan delivered a total of 1.24 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Taiwan.
In March this year, Japanese drugmaker Daiichi Sankyo Co. has started manufacturing the COVID-19 vaccine of AstraZeneca a month after concluding an outsourcing agreement with the British pharmaceutical company.
It was reported that Japan has so far secured more than 100 million AstraZeneca doses but does not intend to use them immediately in public inoculation due to the alleged rare cases of blood clots that occurred in Europe.