President Ashraf Ghani has said that the World Bank has pledged to provide $100 million to Afghanistan to help the country in the delivery of COVID-19 vaccine for the citizens.  

“The World Bank and other partners that contributed in the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) in principle pledged to provide us $100 million. Also, the Asian Development Bank has pledged another $40 million of funds for the vaccine,” said Ghani.  

Meanwhile, officials from the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) have also said that Afghanistan has managed to achieve a sufficient amount of money for the vaccine.  

According to MoPH, at first, the vaccine will be provided to 20 percent of the population.  

Citizens in Afghanistan have criticized the government for its lack of testing laboratories.  

Juma Khan is a native of Malistan district of Ghazni province who was visiting Kabul to carry out his COVID-19 test.  

“There are labs for the coronavirus. There is only the Afghan-Japan hospital for the entire country, but it is not sufficient to have one lab in the entire country,” said Juma Khan.  

“Regarding the vaccine, I think if the vaccine comes, it will be used by the strongmen and the poor will not have access to it,” said Allah Mohammad Noori, a resident of Parwan.  

“We have received tangible financial commitments as part of the COVAX facility (avi is co-leading COVAX, the vaccines pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator. This involves coordinating the COVAX The facility, a global risk-sharing mechanism for pooled procurement and equitable distribution of eventual COVID-19 vaccines.) we are in direct contact with them. We will have 16 million doses of vaccines in the first phase which will cover 8 million Afghans,” said Wahid Majroh, the deputy Minister of Public Health.  

Latest COVID-19 figures in Afghanistan and the world:  

The Ministry of Public Health on Tuesday reported 230 new positive cases of COVID-19 out of 1,654 samples tested in the last 24 hours.     

The Public Health Ministry also reported 6 deaths and 49 recoveries from COVID-19 in the same period.     

The new cases were reported in Kabul (48), Herat (12), Kandahar (14), Nangarhar (9), Takhar (18), Parwan (15), Nimruz (2), Badghis (1), Ghazni (12), Wardak (4), Helmand (9), Laghman (3), Kapisa (13), Panjshir (8), Zabul (1) and Uruzgan (4) provinces.    

The deaths were reported in Kabul (2), Herat (1), Balkh (1), Nimruz (1) and Helmand (1) provinces, according to data provided by the Ministry of Public Health.   

The data by the ministry shows that the cumulative number of total cases is now 48,363, the number of total reported deaths is 1,908, and the total number of recoveries is 38,033. 

So far, 160,161 samples have been tested in government centers and there are 7,890 known active COVID-19 cases in the country, data by the ministry indicates.   

The number of deaths from COVID-19 globally is more than 1,544,985 and the number of known global coronavirus cases is 67,618,431, according to Johns Hopkins University.