U.S. health officials have begun offering coronavirus vaccines to Afghan evacuees arriving to Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam said Friday.

       As of Friday morning, 14,000 Afghan men, women and children have landed at Dulles International Airport after scrambling to catch flights out of Kabul, Northam (D) said.

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       Kabul and most of the rest of Afghanistan fell under Taliban control earlier this month, prompting a massive airlift of U.S. citizens and Afghans who’ve worked with the U.S. military and became targets for reprisals.

       With concerns about the coronavirus arriving with the evacuees, state and federal health officials have been testing everyone who has landed at Dulles or — in the case of U.S. citizens on those planes — requiring them to at least provide proof of a negative test result.

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       So far, fewer than 20 evacuees have tested positive, prompting state officials to isolate them away from others, Northam said during a press briefing.

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       “If people are saying this mission is bringing in covid to the United States, it’s just simply not true,” Northam said.

       State and federal officials have also set up a mass vaccination site inside the Dulles Expo Center, where Afghan nationals have been temporarily housed before being flown to military installations in Virginia and other parts of the country. Efforts are underway to open another vaccination site in a Marriott hotel at Dulles Airport for U.S. citizens who were on those planes, a state official said.

       During the briefing, a state health official said the number of people taking the vaccine “has been small.”

       Northam said such reluctance is understandable, given the trauma that the evacuees have experienced — including Taliban harassment on the way to the Kabul airport — and a lack of understanding about vaccines in general.

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       “These people are just coming out of a war zone, they’re landing in a new country,” he said. “I don’t think this is something that you just automatically want to say: ‘You need to get a shot.’ We’re trying to at least handle some of these individuals with respect and, I’d call it, kid gloves rather than saying: ‘Do this and do that.’ ”

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       Northam said three military installations in Virginia are being used to temporarily house Afghan nationals: the Fort Lee Army Base near Petersburg, the Fort Pickett Army Base in Blackstone and the U.S. Marine Quantico Corps Base Quantico in Northern Virginia.

       Altogether, those sites can accommodate as many as 17,500 people if necessary, according to an overview of each base’s capacity limits that Northam provided.

       The evacuees are meant to stay at those sites long enough to receive medical treatment, be approved for government aid, then matched with more permanent housing either in another state or within Virginia, state officials said.