Japan to quickly raise daily booster shots to 1 mln as Omicron runs rampant

TOKYO – Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Monday said he has put into action plans to rapidly increase the number of COVID-19 booster shots available to combat the highly-transmissible Omicron variant of the virus that is wreaking havoc on the country.

At a lower house budget meeting on Monday, Kishida said he has informed his ministers to quickly increase the number of booster shots being administered to 1 million per day.

“By setting a clear goal, the government as a whole will work to deliver shots to those who hope to be vaccinated as soon as possible,” Kishida told the parliamentary session.

The Japanese premier told the budget committee that the booster shots, or the third shots, will be paramount in mitigating the severity of symptoms in affected patients and thus helping to alleviate the strain on the medical system.

Kishida said before the parliamentary session that he had instructed Health Minister Shigeyuki Goto and other relevant ministers to achieve the target of 1 million shots per day at the very earliest juncture.

He said he has told his ministers to urge local governments to expedite the distribution of vaccination coupons to the public and to set up more vaccination centers.

He also said that businesses that were capable of vaccinating their staff with their own qualified doctors in-house should do so.

The Japanese leader added that vaccinating frontline workers such as police officers and firefighters should be prioritized so key services  can remain unaffected. Teachers and nursery school staff should also be vaccinated as a matter of urgency, he added.

Kishida’s push for the country to once again step up its vaccination campaign comes as out of Japan’s population of 125 million people, only 4.8 percent have received their booster shots as of late last week.

As the world’s third-largest economy, Japan is flagging a long way behind other advanced nations, despite the Omicron variant here having run rampant for a long while.

Read more: Japan to reopen mass COVID-19 vaccination center to speed up boosters

In Britain, France and Germany, for example, more than 50 percent of their populations have already received their third jabs.

Time is of the essence for Japan, which has been recording daily nationwide infections upwards of 100,000 recently, with Saturday’s figure hitting 102,371.

In Tokyo, cases are also worryingly high, with the metropolitan government reporting 21,122 new COVID-19 cases on Saturday, marking the second-highest daily tally on record.

Mass vaccination centers that have been reopened in Tokyo last week and in Osaka on Monday, and are being operated by the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) are administering vaccinations at a rate well-below capacity, with Kishida saying the number of jabs per day will be increased.

The mass vaccination centers will offer jabs to people aged 18 or older through July 31, the government has said.  Enditem