Kenya is running out of vaccines and is desperately seeking new doses in order to be able to carry out AstraZeneca's booster shots within the maximum time limits set by the World Health Organisation, i.e. 12 weeks after the first vaccine.
In recent days, the Kenyan Ministry of Health had denounced the stalemate in vaccinations and in the acquisition of new stocks, after entering the last 100,000 available, which in the initial intentions on arrival last March, should serve for emergencies.
Yesterday, Minister Mutahi Kagwe announced that he had ordered 150,000 new doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which should arrive in Kenya by June. The DRC had ordered the doses but was unable to distribute them in time due to the disorganisation of its distribution network. Kenya hopes to distribute them before they expire. In sub-Saharan Africa, Malawi has admitted in recent days that it had to eliminate 20 000 doses provided by the international Covax programme for developing countries because they had expired.
As we have already reported, in recent months Kenya had ordered another million AstraZeneca doses, which were to be used for recalls, from India.
Soon after, however, a wave of an indigenous variant broke out in the large Asian state, and since then the emergency has been continuous and very worrying, so Dehli has suspended exports of vaccines produced under licence from the Oxford-based company by the Serum Institute, and Kenya has been left high and dry.
Now the Kenyan government has begun new discussions with Covax, to obtain vaccines that private hospitals could buy to meet the demands of citizens and residents who can afford to receive them by paying, also because the less affluent and culturally advanced population seems to be uninterested, if not hostile, to be vaccinated.
Meanwhile, in the last 24 hours another 494 positive cases of Covid-19 were recorded in the country from a sample of 6,428 swabs, with the positivity rate dropping from 9.1% last Wednesday to 7.7%.  
Of the positive cases recorded on Thursday, 481 are Kenyans while 13 are foreigners.
At the same time, 50 patients recovered from the virus, 27 from home care and 23 from various hospitals in the country, bringing the total number of recoveries to 114,285.
There were only five reported deaths, but this is not always a good time to record them every 24 hours. However, the total number of deaths rose to 3,040.
Currently, there are 1,085 patients in various health facilities across the country, while 4,624 are in isolation and home care. 109 patients are in the intensive care unit (ICU), 20 of whom are on ventilatory support and 67 on supplementary oxygen. 22 patients are under observation. Another 86 patients are separately on supplementary oxygen with 81 of them in the general wards and five in the High Dependency Unit (HDU). To date, a total of 948,980 people have been vaccinated against Covid-19 across the country. Of these 288,146 are aged 58 years and above, health workers 163,490, teachers 149,018, security officers 80,153 and others are 266,173.