Morocco’s COVID-19 Strategy: From Lockdowns to Mass Vaccination Success

At the beginning of the health crisis, the Moroccan government, in order to strengthen its already fragile health system, declared a state of health emergency on March 22, 2020. After three months of strict application, this measure was relaxed, but restrictions on travel between cities and the curfew were maintained. These efforts have helped reduce the daily death toll from 92 (as of late November 2020) to just 4 in the last 24 hours.

After achieving this goal, Morocco has focused its efforts on ensuring collective immunity for its population. With this in mind, it has simultaneously engaged in negotiations with several vaccine laboratories. Today, the kingdom has already vaccinated more than 4 million people with the British AstraZeneca and Chinese Sinopharm vaccines. To accelerate the ongoing vaccination campaign, launched on January 29, the government has just authorized the acquisition of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine and the American Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Health Minister Khaled Ait Taleb explained to EFE that the Sputnik V vaccine has been approved by the Moroccan scientific committee and that 1 million doses have already been ordered and will be delivered in two batches, in March and April.

In addition, King Mohammed VI has ordered free vaccination for those over 18 (including foreign residents). On average, 100,000 doses are inoculated daily. Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) congratulated Morocco for being one of the ten countries in the world to have taken up the challenge of vaccination with 4,169,133 vaccinated with the first dose as of March 12 and 1,224,959 with the second dose.

Ait Taleb stressed that the pace of vaccination of the first dose will slow down in the coming days due to global supply difficulties, but he assured that the national vaccination campaign will reach its goal of collective immunity.