BUDAPEST (Reuters) – The Czech Republic may consider using vaccines not yet registered in the EU to speed up vaccines, Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on Friday on a trip to Hungary that gave emergency approval to Russian and Chinese vaccines .
He said he also discussed the matter with German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said he wanted Russian or Chinese vaccines to receive European approval.
The governments of European Union countries are facing a reckoning on vaccination programs that lagged far behind the United States and the former EU member, Great Britain.
So far, Hungary is the only EU member to have approved the emergency use of Chinese and Russian vaccines. Other EU countries have followed the European regulator EMA, which has so far approved only three vaccines from Western companies.
“I spoke about the Russian vaccine and the Chinese vaccine with Chancellor Merkel, and the Chancellor, as well as the Prime Minister of Bavaria, are unequivocally asking for this vaccine to be approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA),” said Babis. after meeting the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban.
“Now, of course, the question is whether the producer asks for approval or not, and of course we want to consider, if we get the vaccine, to follow the same path that Hungary did because time is of the essence.”
Babis did not respond to a request for additional comments. Before his trip to Budapest, he said he intended to discuss the Russian Sputnik V vaccine with Orban.
Czech authorities had insisted until Friday on the release of the EMA for any vaccine to be used in the country.
The results of Sputnik V’s peer-reviewed final stage tests published in the international medical journal The Lancet this week showed that it was almost 92% effective in combating COVID-19.
Russia shared data from its Phase III trial with regulators in several countries and began the process of submitting them to EMA for approval in the European Union.
China has produced two vaccines, from Sinopharm and Sinovac, and already exports millions of doses of each around the world, mainly to developing countries.
The Czech Republic suffered one of the highest infection and mortality rates in the world, with 16,976 deaths out of a population of 10.7 million.
So far, it has administered 327,759 doses of vaccines from Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna, mainly to citizens over 80 and health professionals, and expects AstraZeneca’s first vaccine shipment on Saturday.
(Reporting by Gergely Szakacs in Budapest, Jan Lopatka and Robert Muller in Prague)