Honduras said Monday that neighbor El Salvador will help it buy coronavirus vaccines from China, with which Tegucigalpa does not have diplomatic ties.

Honduras is one of 15 countries to maintain an official relationship with Taiwan, which Beijing considers a rebel province of China.

El Salvador in 2018 switched its diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to China.

"El Salvador will help us break the geopolitical blockade and buy the vaccine from mainland China," the Honduran health ministry said on Twitter Monday. "Honduras offers to pay for as many as they can obtain for our people."

In a separate tweet, the ministry declared itself "grateful to friendly countries that do not politicize the pandemic," citing Israel, which donated Honduras' first 6,000 vaccine doses, and Russia which has said it would send 40,000 doses of its Sputnik V jab this week.

"In the past, we donated medicines and some biosecurity material to El Salvador," said the ministry, and "now El Salvador is helping us to break the blockade."

Honduras has had difficulty obtaining vaccines to control the pandemic which overwhelmed hospitals after political campaigning for March primary elections and massive population movements over the Easter holidays.

The country of nearly 10 million people has so far received 248,600 doses. On top of the 6,000 from Israel, it received 237,600 AstraZeneca jabs through the global Covax mechanism, and 6,000 of 4.2 million doses bought from Russia.

Honduras has registered more than 220,000 coronavirus infections and 5,665 deaths.

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez has a complicated relationship with El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, who has been critical of his counterpart's reelection in 2018 and has denounced corruption in the neighboring Central American state.

The announcement came a day after Bukele agreed to a request from seven opposition mayors in Honduras for vaccines for their people. They claimed the national government was "incompetent" in its management of the pandemic.

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