VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

UNICEF, the United Nations agency that provides humanitarian assistance to children, on Monday (19/10) said it had secured about 520 million syringes ahead of the launch of the COVID-19 vaccine.

The procurement is part of a broader push to accumulate 1 billion syringes by 2021 to help deliver vaccines.

"Vaccinating the world against COVID-19 will be one of the greatest mass efforts in human history, and we must act as quickly as a vaccine can be produced," UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said in a statement.

"In order for the future to go fast, we must act quickly now. By the end of this year, we will have more than half a billion syringes stored where they can be quickly distributed and cost-effective," he said.

The coronavirus has been raging around the world since it was first detected in the city of Wuhan, China, last December.

To date, over 40 million people worldwide have been infected with COVID-19 and over 1.1 million have died from the disease, according to data from US-based Johns Hopkins University. (Antaranews)