Serbian Prime Minister: First Vaccines of Three Manufacturers to Arrive by End of Year

Ana Brnabic (BETAPHOTO/SERBIAN GOVERNMENT/SLOBODAN MILJEVIC)

Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic has announced that Serbia had signed COVID-19  vaccine purchase agreements with the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer-BioNTech, Russian Sputnik V and Chinese Sinopharm. The first shipment, she added, is planned to arrive before the year ends.

She said for the Pink TV in the evening of Dec. 20, that the first vaccines to arrive will be Pfizer’s, as the negotiations with them took the longest and the Serbian Medicines and Medical Devices Agency had already approved the American company’s product.

“We expect the first shipment this week. It won’t, of course, be a large one, and it will not serve for testing… but for vaccination. We should have significantly larger quantities in January and February,” Brnabic said.

According to her, the fight for the vaccine had been “painful” adding that the gap between the poor and the wealthy will turn into an “insurmountable abyss” thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The richest countries have very little empathy for the poor ones. What is very important [at this moment], like it was during the fight for the ventilators, is that Serbia has had financial power [and could therefore] not only purchase the vaccines, but give an advance, stand in line for those vaccines, and [with its] political credibility communicate directly with the manufacturers, which not every country can do,” the Serbian prime minister concluded.