Erdogan raises vaccine delays with China

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday he had told China's visiting foreign minister that Beijing had fallen behind with its promised deliveries of coronavirus vaccines.

Erdogan met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Ankara on Thursday for 70 minutes of private talks that came during a new spike in Covid-19 infections.

Turkey is relying on the Chinese firm Sinovac's CoronaVac for the bulk of its inoculation effort and only received the first 1.4 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine this week.

Turkey has so far received 28 million CoronaVac doses and Erdogan said he had told Wang that the initial agreement was for 50 million shots to have been delivered by the end of last month.

"I reminded him of this," Erdogan told reporters. "We are expecting them quickly."

Erdogan said Wang promised to relay the message to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The Turkish leader added that Ankara had an agreement for a total of 100 million of the Chinese doses to have been delivered by the end of April.

"He said that he will discuss this and inform us," Erdogan said.

Turkey has given one shot to more than eight million people and inoculated nearly 6.5 million with the full two doses.

It has recorded nearly 29,000 official Covid-19 deaths and seen the daily infection rate approach 30,000 after lifting some restrictions this month.