Bahrain approves Sinopharm vaccine for children aged 3-11

Doses will be distributed from Wednesday

A billboard in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, urges people to sign up for a voluntary Covid-19 vaccine. AFP

Bahrain has approved the Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine for children aged 3 to 11.

The vaccines will be available from Wednesday and parents or guardians can register children on the Ministry of Health website of the Covid-19 app BeAware, the National Medical Taskforce for Combatting the Coronavirus announced.

The Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine would soon be approved for children between 5 and 11, it also said.

Bahrain has registered 276,608 cases of coronavirus and 1,393 related deaths since the start of the pandemic. Case numbers have dropped significantly since a daily high of 3,273 during Bahrain's second wave, to only 37 on Monday. The nation of 1.7 million people has administered around 2,746,461 doses of Covid-19 vaccines, enough to have fully inoculated 83.7 per cent of the population.

In efforts to get as much of the population protected as quickly as possible, the kingdom launched mobile vaccinations in February.