Kurdistan Region prioritizes teachers to receive COVID-19 vaccinations

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – School instructors in the Kurdistan Region have been shortlisted to receive coronavirus vaccines, two ministries announced on Saturday.

They will now be classified in the first vaccination priority group by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that includes health care workers, members of the security forces, the elderly, and people with underlying medical conditions.

In a joint statement of the KRG Ministries of Health and Education, schoolteachers can receive available COVID-19 at vaccination centers across the autonomous region after they fill out an application form.

Health and education authorities had designated every Tuesday for teachers to receive vaccine doses, according to the statement, saying those who complete the process will be instructed to carry “a personal ID or school support letter” as a form of proof.

The decision comes as the Kurdistan Region is seeing a new surge of daily COVID-19 infections following health officials identified the first cases of the Delta variant. Over 2,100 new cases were confirmed on Sunday, a health ministry spokesperson told Kurdistan 24.

The vaccines currently available in the autonomous region of Iraq are Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinopharm, and Oxford-AstraZeneca.

So far, the Region has administered more than 400,000 doses, according to the latest figures from Kurdish health authorities.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in late 2019, the Kurdistan Region has recorded over 211,000 cases of coronavirus, 4,600 of which have been fatal. 

Editing by John J. Catherine