Sri Lanka on Saturday approved Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use.
It comes as the island nation battles a third wave of the virus, while suffering a restricted supply of vaccines from neighbouring India.
Dr. Sudharshani Fernandopulle, the minister overseeing the fight against the epidemic, said in a statement the government would order 5 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
Sri Lanka is seeking to secure other vaccines as the Serum Institute of India, the world's largest vaccine manufacturer, has suspended the delivery of AstraZeneca's Covishield vaccine due to spiralling coronavirus infections in India.
Sri Lanka is the first country in South Asia to approve the Pfizer vaccine. It has also approved Russia's Sputnik and China's Sinopharm vaccines for emergency use.
The island nation reported 1,914 new cases and 19 deaths in the past 24 hours, according to federal health data, and its total number of active cases is higher than any point since the pandemic began.
Infections surged after crowded celebrations for traditional New Year last month.
President Donald Trump capped the first day of his Republican Party's first-ever midterm convention by proposing to pay every US adult a $5,000 "Trump dividend" if his party wins November's congressional elections.
A large-scale search and rescue operation was underway off the western Philippine island of Palawan on Thursday after a passenger ferry caught fire, killing five people and leaving dozens of passengers missing.
President Donald Trump said he expected the war with Iran to end after the November US midterm elections after the two sides launched their biggest wave of attacks on shipping since the start of the six-month-old war.
At least 20 people have been killed in a fire aboard a foreign cargo vessel undergoing repairs at a state-owned shipyard in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao on Thursday, state media reported, with five others still missing.
The US military said on Wednesday three people have been killed in a strike on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea, the latest in a series of attacks that Washington says target "narco-terrorists" but human rights groups condemn as extrajudicial killings.
At least 14 people were killed and 11 wounded on Wednesday in an explosion at a temporary site used to store weapons and remnants of war near the Syrian city of Sarmada in Idlib province, state television reported.
The United States has destroyed five Iranian oil carriers on Tuesday after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) targeted its navy warship with ballistic missiles "twice over the past two days".
Britain's NATS air traffic control provider has a week to investigate the systems failure that halted flights and stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers, the government said, as pressure mounts on its chief executive.
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