Sinovac

A total of 7,556 COVID-19 cases were reported in Turkey between June 6 and 12, the Health Ministry said in its weekly coronavirus statistics. 

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca had previously announced that the ministry would stop publishing daily statistics after the number of cases started to decline.

Caseloads of hospitals across the country are declining as the COVID-19 pandemic is weakening by the day, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has said, warning that people, especially the elderly, still need to get their booster shots against the virus.

More than 85 percent of the adult population in Turkey has been double jabbed and it is a "significant success," Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has said.

Nearly 53 million people aged 18 and above have been given two doses of the vaccine against COVID-19, according to data from the Health Ministry.

China on Feb. 12 said it had given "conditional" approval for Pfizer's Covid-19 drug Paxlovid to treat adults with mild to moderate illness and a high risk of developing severe disease.

Turkey has started to give the locally developed inactivated vaccine, Turkovac, as a booster shot to those who have already received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA jab.

Turkey will give a dose of a locally developed COVID-19 vaccine, Turkovac, to those who have already received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has said.

The next three months will be crucial for efforts to confront challenges from the Omicron strain of COVID-19, a health expert has said, calling for speeding up the drive to give booster shoots.

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca last week announced the first cases of the Omicron variant in Turkey.

Turkey has donated 200,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Burkina Faso and Togo, two Western African countries where the effects of the pandemic have had more troubling consequences than the rest of the world, in a campaign by the Organization of Turkic States.

Turkey aims to vaccinate more than 80 percent of the population against COVID-19, Professor Alper Şen from the Health Ministry's Science Board has said.

The vaccine drive is not moving at the desired speed, but still the vaccination rate in Turkey is higher than many countries in Europe, according to Şen.

Turkey is closely following developments in the wake of the emergence of the new COVID-19 strain, Omicron, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has said, adding that the current situation does not necessitate taking additional measures.

He recalled that Turkey immediately acted after the new variant was detected in the world and imposed travel bans on certain countries.