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 jet carrying 550,000 doses of vaccines developed by Chinese state-owned Sinopharm landed at Budapest international airport after flying from Beijing. The loading is sufficient to treat 275,000 people with the two-dose vaccine, said Dr Agnes Galgoczy, of the National Center for Public Health, at a news conference.
“With this vaccine, five different types are now available in Hungary so that we can vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible,” said Galgoczy, adding that vaccines will not start until the submission is evaluated by the National Center for Public Health.
Hungarian health officials were the first in the EU to approve the Sinopharm jab for emergency use on January 29. This came after a government decree simplified Hungary’s vaccine approval process, allowing any vaccine administered to at least 1 million people worldwide to be used without undergoing review by the country’s drug regulator.
The country expects to receive 5 million total doses of the Sinopharm vaccine in the next four months, enough to treat 2.5 million people in the country of nearly 10 million.
Hungarian officials, including Prime Minister Viktor Orban, have criticized the EU’s common vaccine procurement program, claiming that the bloc’s slow implementation of vaccines is costing lives.
“If vaccines do not come from Brussels, we must get them from elsewhere … Hungarians cannot be allowed to die simply because Brussels is very slow in obtaining vaccines,” said Orban last month.
Hungary also agreed to buy 2 million doses of the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, which hospitals began to administer in Budapest last week.
On Friday, Orban said that these additional vaccines from Russia and China will allow Hungary to vaccinate millions more people until the end of May than other European countries with similar populations.
“As things stand now, (we can vaccinate) 6.8 million people by the end of May or early June,” said Orban in a radio interview. “I think this is huge.”
Orban said earlier that he would personally choose to be inoculated with the Sinopharm vaccine, since he trusts her more.
“I think the Chinese have known this virus the longest and are probably the best,” he said last month.
The Sinopharm vaccine, which the developer says is almost 80% effective, is already in use in Serbia, neighboring Hungary, where about half a million people, including ethnic Hungarians, have already received the vaccine. The company has not yet released data on the results of the stage 3 vaccine tests.
The shipment of new vaccines represents about 40% of all doses of the COVID-19 vaccine that Hungary has received so far and makes Sinopharm almost as prevalent in Hungary as the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.
But recent research shows that some Hungarians are reluctant to receive the Sinopharm vaccine. A survey of 1,000 people in the capital Budapest by researcher Median and the 21 Research Center showed that among those who wish to receive a vaccine, only 27% would get a Chinese vaccine, compared with 43% a Russian vaccine and 84% a developed jab. in western countries. The survey had a margin of error of about 3%.
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This story has been corrected to show that around 500,000 people have been vaccinated in Serbia, including ethnic Hungarians, not 500,000 ethnic Hungarians.
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