US hands Vietnam 34 more ultra-cool freezers for vaccine storage

The U.S. Department of Defense promised to give Vietnam 111 ultra-low temperature, medical-grade storage units worth approximately $1 million last year and 77 of them had already been delivered to Vietnam.

Of the newly-arrived freezers, the Pasteur Institute will keep six and the rest will go to Military Hospital 175, Cho Ray Hospital and the Centers for Diseases Control (CDC) in 20 localities in southern Vietnam.

Each freezer can store up to 175,500 vaccine doses at the temperature of minus 20-80 degrees Celsius.

Attending the event to hand over the freezers, the U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Marc Knapper said Vietnam and the U.S. have supported each other throughout the pandemic.

He said Vietnam had handed over millions of personal protective equipment when the Covid-19 was at its worst in the U.S. In return, the U.S. has supported Vietnam with ventilators and medical equipment worth more than $31 million in total.

Nguyen Vu Trung, Director of the Pasteur Institute, said that the institute and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are cooperating in global health security. For the response to the Covid-19 epidemic, the institute has received technical support from the U.S. CDC to deploy a key Covid-19 surveillance system and support pandemic investigation.

The Southern Regional Emergency Response Center, established with funding from the U.S. CDC and the Department of Defense, has also played an active role in responding to the epidemic in the southern region, he said.

Since July last year, the U.S. has given over 26 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine through the Covax program.