Croatia not likely to get quantities of coronavirus vaccine promised

ZAGREB, 26 January (Hina) – The director of the Croatian Public Health Institute, Krunoslav Capak, said on Tuesday that it was not likely that Croatia would get the quantities of coronavirus vaccine promised to it, stressing that although the EU had done all it could to ensure a fair distribution of vaccines based on the population size, it seemed that this would not materialise.

“Pfizer has reduced the number of dozes for us in the next three shipments. What we will receive within the next two weeks has been reduced by 14 boxes, or 975 doses in total. We have received 11 boxes of vaccine fewer, which is disappointing and makes the implementation of the vaccination plan difficult. All the quantities that we now have we are keeping for second shots,” Capak said in an interview with the HTV public television service in the evening.

 “Moderna has also postponed its shipment for a week. The 4,800 doses we should have already received will be delivered on Sunday,” Capak said.

He said that the EU had invested a lot of money in AstraZeneca, which should have started delivering its vaccine in December, but is now expected to register it on 29 January. “The EU is urging them to start their deliveries sooner and to honour the agreement. We hope that the situation will improve, but it is not likely that we will get the doses that were promised to us.”

Capak said he did not know how much vaccine rich countries had bought.

“The system that we believed in is collapsing. The EU did all it could to ensure a fair distribution based on the population size, but it seems that this will not materialise. Countries that negotiated on their own and paid more, obviously got more than we did,” he said.

Capak said that all patients in Croatia would get their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on time. As for Moderna, he said it was unlikely that it would increase its vaccine deliveries in February and that all hopes were now pinned on AstraZeneca. “In that case we could vaccinate elderly people and chronic patients by the end of February, but we would need considerable quantities of vaccine because there are at least 600-700,000 such people in Croatia,” he said.