Fumio Kishida, the Japanese Prime Minister, has recently gone on record to say that he is looking to speed up the country’s COVID-19 booster shots to 1 million a day by the end of February. This figure will be double the pace of what the country is currently doing as of now.
At a televised parliamentary meeting of the budget committee, Kishida said that he has instructed all his ministers to work with local authorities in order to speed up the inoculations as much as possible. Notably, the nationwide coronavirus infection surpassed 100,000 last Saturday for the first time. Most of the regions in Japan are under infection control measures to try to curb the Omicron variant, which has particularly spread in areas where fewer than 5% of the population have received the booster shots. Capital Tokyo and 12 out of the 47 prefectures in the country are on the verge of extending the virus curbs for another three weeks.