Covid vaccine UAE: 89,746 doses administered in 24 hours

The UAE has administered 89,746 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine in the past 24 hours.

"" 89,746 "#_19" 24 .. 6,668,637. # pic.twitter.com/TrijpEixrm

— (@wamnews) March 16, 2021

The country's Ministry of Health and Prevention (MoHAP) said the total doses administered now stands at 6.6 million. This takes the rate of doses per 100 people to 67.43.

UAE remains poised to reach its ambitious target of vaccinating 50 per cent of the population soon.

In the past couple of weeks, the vaccination drive has been progressing steadily while prioritising the vulnerable category of the general public. According to the stats from Our World in Data website, the UAE continues to be second best globally in terms of the cumulative doses administered per 100 people.

Regular booster vaccines against the novel coronavirus will be needed because of mutations that make it more transmissible and better able to evade human immunity, the head of Britain's effort to sequence the virus's genomes told Reuters.

The novel coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people globally since it emerged in China in late 2019, mutates around once every two weeks, slower than influenza or HIV, but enough to require tweaks to vaccines.

Sharon Peacock, who heads Covid-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) which has sequenced nearly half of all the novel coronavirus genomes so far mapped globally, said international cooperation was needed in the "cat and mouse" battle with the virus.