Andrei Baciu talks about one of the topics that have been extremely discussed both in Romania and in other areas of Europe in the last year, the number of doses of vaccine bought for immunization, he affirms that in our country there are still millions of doses received as part of EU contracts.
Andrei Baciu also explains why the European Commission decided to conclude contracts with various vaccine manufacturers before they are ready to be offered to people, but also that until 2023 there are still many doses to be delivered to Europe, especially since it is not known how the pandemic will evolve in the future.
"This is an issue we have been facing for the last few months, inventory management. We have millions, and Romania is involved in this European mechanism. And there is another extremely important issue, we talked about why Romania has so many extra doses, what will be done with them.
It is the same issue, and the same topic that is being discussed at the European level. It is the initial explanation that is the most important, and the one that transposes the subject, namely, in the most critical moments of the pandemic, this vaccination solution was foreseen, but there were 6 vaccine producers who had a potential product, without any of them already a final result.
The European Commission wanted all European citizens to have access to safe and effective vaccines as soon as possible, so it made agreements with the 6 companies that were working on vaccines at the time. The luck is that 5 out of 6 companies produce an effective vaccine, it could be the other way around, i.e. 1 out of 6, and that way we would have had enough vaccines much, much, later.
So that was the idea behind it, approximately 4 billion doses were taken at the European level, certainly contracted doses until 2023, so that whatever the epidemiological scenario, whatever the epidemiological crisis that may occur, the European population have priority access to the only treatment against SARS-CoV-2, which will be between us in the long term.
There is no element, no perspective, by which we can conclude that the virus will simply disappear from us. There are several types of vaccines stored in Romania, where we could, we suspended deliveries of vaccines, for example, we no longer use the AstraZeneca serum, and we suspended deliveries."
