June 16 (Reuters) – Equatorial Guinea has purchased 500,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses from China’s Sinopharm, its health ministry said on Wednesday,

“At the Beijing airport, the 500,000 doses… to continue the vaccination campaign are ready to be shipped,” the health ministry said on Twitter, adding a video of crates labelled “Sinopharm” being loaded from a semi-truck.

The tweet did not specify the price Equatorial Guinea had agreed to pay for the shots. The ministry could not be reached for further comments.

China sent 100,000 doses of Sinopharm’s vaccine to Equatorial Guinea in February, as part of a series of donations to African countries struggling to procure shots.

To date, Equatorial Guinea has immunized 17% of its population, making it Africa’s third-most immunized country per capita, the health ministry said in a later tweet.

The country has registered around 8,670 COVID-19 infections and 120 deaths, according to figures from the Africa Centre for Disease Control. (Writing by Cooper Inveen Editing by Mark Potter)

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