BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) – A shipment of COVID-19 vaccines produced in China arrived in Hungary on Tuesday, making it the first of 27 European Union nations to receive a Chinese vaccine.
A plane carrying 550,000 doses of vaccine developed by the Chinese state-owned company Sinopharm landed at Budapest International Airport after flying from Beijing. The shipment is enough to serve 275,000 people with the two-dose dispenser, Dr. Agnes Galgoczy of the National Center for Public Health told a news conference.
“With this vaccine, there are now five different types available in Hungary so we can vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible,” said Galgoczy, who added that vaccines will not start until the National Center for Public Health evaluates the vaccine. shipping. .
The Hungarian health authorities were the first in the EU to approve the Sinopharm jab for emergency use on January 29th. This came after a government decree streamlined Hungary’s vaccine approval process, as it allowed any vaccine administered to at least one million people worldwide to be used without being reviewed by the country’s drug regulator.
The country expects to receive 5 million total doses of the Sinopharm vaccine over the next four months, enough to treat 2.5 million people in the country of about 10 million.
Hungarian officials, including Prime Minister Viktor Orban, have been critical of the EU’s common vaccine acquisition program, saying the slow deployment of blockade shots is costing lives.
“If vaccines don’t come from Brussels, we have to get them from other places … Hungarians can’t be allowed to die simply because Brussels is too slow to buy vaccines,” Orban said last month. .
Hungary has also agreed to buy two million doses of the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, which hospitals began administering in Budapest last week.
On Friday, Orban called for these additional vaccines from Russia and China that will allow Hungary to vaccinate millions more people. in late May than other European countries with similar populations.
“As things stand now, (we can vaccinate) 6.8 million people in late May or early June,” Orban said in a radio interview. “I think that’s huge.”
Orban said earlier that he would personally choose to be inoculated with the Sinopharm vaccine as he trusts it more.
“I think the Chinese have known about this virus for longer and they probably know it better,” he said last month.
The Sinopharm vaccine, which the developer says is almost 80% effective, is already used in Serbia, the EU’s neighbor, which does not belong to the EU, where about half a million people, including Hungarians of ethnicity, have already received the punch. The company has not yet released data on the results of the phase 3 trials of the vaccine.
The new vaccine shipment accounts for about 40% of all doses of COVID-19 vaccine Hungary has received so far, making Sinopharm almost the same in Hungary as the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.
But recent polls show some Hungarians are reluctant to receive the Sinopharm coup. A survey of 1,000 people in the capital of Budapest by surveyor Median and Research Center 21 showed that among those who were willing to receive a vaccine, only 27% would get a Chinese vaccine, compared to 43 % a Russian vaccine and 84% a puncture developed in the western countries. The survey had a margin of error of about 3%.
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This story has been corrected to show that some 500,000 people have been vaccinated in Serbia, including ethnic Hungarians, not 500,000 Hungarians.
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