Anyone living in Egypt who is 18 or older can register now to be vaccinated against covid-19. More than a dozen of us here at Enterprise and at our parent company, Inktank, have signed up since this morning.

It takes only a few minutes to register on the Health Ministry’s registration portal. Some tips:

• Choose Register for Vaccination from the homepage.
• Choose Other Categories unless you’re an MD or healthcare worker and if you don’t have a chronic condition,.
• If at any stage you input that you have one or more health conditions (which you can still do if you choose Other Categories), you may need to have documents on hand to substantiate it and be ready to upload them.
• Have a copy of your national ID or passport information page ready to upload. It can’t be more than 5 MB and must be a .jpg or .png file.
• Have your mobile at hand — you’ll get a six-digit verification code as you complete the first screen and will need to input it.

The final screen will give you your request number, and you should also receive a copy of the number on by SMS. Make sure you keep it — you’ll need it when you’re notified that it’s your turn next.

Around 20k citizens are registering on the ministry’s website daily, according to a cabinet statement, and the total number of those registered for the vaccine looks set to hit 500k by the end of the month.

Egypt is presently vaccinating 1-2k people per day. We expect that rate to accelerate as the Health Ministry with the arrival of an additional 350k doses of Sinopharm’s jab, which are due to arrive tomorrow, according to state-owned Ahram Gate.

But the short-term game changer will be the arrival of the first 5 mn doses of an 8.6 mn shot order of AstraZeneca by March 30, which we’ve placed through the GAVI / Covax initiative, Health Minister Hala Zayed at the cabinet meeting.

Europe’s collective freakout about the safety profile of AstraZeneca’s vaccine may be coming to an end. France, Italy and Ireland all say they are ready to quickly restart their vaccination programs. The news comes one day after the EU’s medicines regulator said there is so far “no indication” that the jab causes blood clots.

So what are they waiting for? The regulator will formally announce tomorrow the results of its investigation into 37 cases of blood clots (five of them fatal) in more than 5 mn people who have received doses of the vaccine.