Hopes are high that a US-supplied shipment of COVID-19 vaccines will give a much-needed push to South Korea’s vaccination campaign as the first batches are slated to arrive Saturday morning.

One million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 vaccine are scheduled to arrive at Seoul Airbase in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province at 00:50 a.m. Saturday, health officials said Friday, following an announcement from the White House a day earlier.

“The animating purpose behind that is actually about the protection of American forces and the forces who serve alongside American forces: The Korean troops who are standing shoulder to shoulder with us in that country,” US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Thursday.

“So it is a unique case and the kind of unique case for which we want to retain some flexibility, which is why we’re giving the majority -- the 75 percent or more -- of our doses through COVAX, but maintaining the capacity to allocate doses outside the COVAX formula as necessary. Korea is one case of that.”

COVAX is a UN-backed global vaccine sharing program to distribute supplies to lower income countries.

US President Joe Biden announced last month that the US will offer enough vaccines to inoculate all 550,000 service members in South Korea. The Janssen vaccine will be the fourth COVID-19 vaccine available in Korea.

Reservation for 900,000 doses of Janssen’s COVID-19 vaccine was logged within just 18 hours of opening. Around 3.71 million members of the armed reserve service and civil defense were eligible to make reservations.

The vaccine only requires a single shot for immunization, as opposed to two shots for other types of COVID-19 vaccines that Korea has secured.

The rollout of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine is expected to speed up South Korea’s national vaccination campaign that kicked off in February so the country can achieve herd immunity by November. The government hopes 13 million people will be inoculated by the end of this month.

More than 7 million people have received their first shots of COVID-19 vaccines as of Thursday, official data showed. Vaccines from AstraZeneca were administered to 4.5 million people, while Pfizer’s accounted for 2.5 million.

Around 4.4 percent of the total population have been fully vaccinated.

By Ko Jun-tae (ko.juntae@heraldcorp.com)