BUDAPEST (Reuters) – The Czech Republic may consider using vaccines not yet registered in the EU to speed up vaccinations, Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on Friday on a trip to Hungary to dispose of Russian and Chinese vaccines in emergencies approved.
He said he had also spoken to German officials about the issue, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said he wanted Russian or Chinese vaccinations to receive European approval.
European Union governments are facing vaccination programs that lag far behind the United States and former EU member Britain.
Hungary is so far the only EU member to approve 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 have talked about the Russian vaccine, and about the Chinese vaccine, with Chancellor Merkel, and the Chancellor as well as the Bavarian Prime Minister, unequivocally asking for this vaccine to be approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA),” Babis said. after meeting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
“The question is, of course, whether the producer asks for the approval or not, and we obviously want to consider getting the same entity as Hungary if we get the vaccine, because time is of the essence.”
Babis did not respond to a request for comment. Before his trip to Budapest, he said he was aiming to discuss the Russian Sputnik V vaccine with Orban.
Czech authorities have until Friday demanded EMA approval for any vaccine used in the country.
Peer-reviewed results from the late-stage Sputnik V, published this week in the international medical journal The Lancet, showed that fighting COVID-19 was almost 92% effective.
Russia has shared data from its Phase III trial with regulators in several countries and has begun the process of submitting it to the EMA for approval in the European Union.
China has manufactured two vaccines, from Sinopharm and Sinovac, and has exported millions of doses of each around the world, mainly to developing countries.
The Czech Republic suffered one of the world’s highest infection and mortality rates, with 16,976 deaths in the population of 10.7 million.
It has so far administered 327,759 vaccine doses of Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna, mostly to citizens over 80 and health workers, and expects the first batch of AstraZeneca vaccines to take place on Saturday.
(Reported by Gergely Szakacs in Budapest, Jan Lopatka and Robert Muller in Prague)