Vietnam has approved Cuba's Abdala vaccine for use against the new coronavirus, the government said on Saturday, as the Southeast Asian country is battling its worst outbreak.
Abdala becomes the eighth COVID-19 vaccine approved for use in Vietnam, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the region, with only 6.3 per cent of its 98 million people having received at least two shots.
The announcement came hours after President Nguyen Xuan Phuc left Hanoi for an official visit to Havana.
Vietnam has recorded 667,650 coronavirus infections and 16,637 deaths, the vast majority in the Delta-driven outbreak from late April.
"The ministry of health has approved Abdala vaccine, based on the country's urgent need for its COVID-19 fight," the government said in a statement.
The ministry last month said Cuba would supply large quantities of Abdala to Vietnam and transfer the production technology by the end of the year.
A fire in Congo's rebel-controlled city of Bukavu killed at least 24 children as it destroyed two schools and burned down around 300 wooden houses, an official from the rebel administration told Reuters on Thursday.
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".
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