UNICEF stockpiling half a billion syringes this year ahead of vaccine
The United Nations Children's Fund said it will stockpile 520 million syringes in its warehouses by the end of the year to begin preparations for a COVID-19 vaccine.
The effort is part of a larger plan of delivering over 1 billion syringes to support vaccination efforts, on top of 620 million syringes that the U.N. agency will purchase for other vaccination programs against other disease such as measles and typhoid.
"Vaccinating the world against COVID-19 will be one of the largest mass undertakings in human history, and we will need to move as quickly as the vaccines can be produced," UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore said in a statement Monday. "In order to move fast later, we must move fast now. By the end of the year, we will already have over half a billion syringes pre-positioned where they can be deployed quickly and cost effectively. That’s enough syringes to wrap around the world one and a half times."