The Egyptian government is placing a massive bet that Chinese vaccines will open a path out of the pandemic. The Health Ministry on Tuesday announced a deal to purchase an additional 20 million doses from Sinopharm with the first shipments expected to arrive later this month.

Those doses will supplement the 80 million that will roll off two local production lines sometime later this spring or early summer. Earlier this month, Egypt’s state-owned pharmaceutical company finalized a production licensing agreement with Sinovac to begin vaccine assembly in Cairo (they won’t create the vaccines from scratch but rather re-package the ingredients in much the same way that a local bottler produces Coca Cola).