An aircraft carrying about two million doses of major US drugmaker Pfizer Inc.’s novel coronavirus vaccine arrived at Narita International Airport in Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, on Monday. 

The plane came from Belgium, where the company has a production base for the vaccine.

Transported by the aircraft were 1,700 boxes of the vaccine, enough for two million jabs, if syringes capable of taking six shots from each vial are used.

The amount of the vaccine shipped to Japan by a single flight was thus the largest. The Pfizer product has so far been the only novel coronavirus vaccine used in Japan.

For the latest shipment, All Nippon Airways, which is in charge of transporting the Pfizer vaccine to Japan, used a large aircraft for the first time. The plane’s loading capacity for the virus is about 70 pct as large as that of the midsize aircraft that the carrier used for the previous shipments.

This was the eleventh flight for carrying the vaccine to Japan.

JIJI Press