Hungary approves Indian CoviShield and China’s CanSino vaccine for emergency use – UPDATE

Hungary is the first European Union (EU) country to approve for emergency use China’s CanSino Biologics coronavirus vaccine and CoviShield, the Indian version of the AstraZeneca shot, the Hungarian surgeon general said on Monday.

New infections are surging in Hungary in a third wave of the pandemic, even as vaccine import and usage rates are among the highest in the EU with the country using Chinese and Russian vaccines as well as Western ones.

Cecília Müller, speaking at the daily press conference of the coronavirus operative board, said she hoped that a greater choice of vaccines would help the country’s vaccination programme, adding that “the jab is the only way out of the epidemic”.

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Müller said that

1.59 million Hungarians, 16 percent of the population, had received at least their first shot, but warned that the third wave of the pandemic was “still extremely dynamic”, with the highly infectious British coronavirus variant causing 90 percent of the new cases.

If both new vaccines are also approved for mass use by the National Health Centre, Hungary will have seven sources to procure vaccines from. It was unclear when and in what quantity Hungary planned to deploy the newly authorised vaccines, or how it planned to buy them.

“We are in a race against time,” Surgeon General Müller told a news briefing.

“We will overturn the four corners of the world for as many doses of proper efficient and safe vaccines as possible.”

Hospitalisation rates are at record levels, and even as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Friday said the health system would cope, some hospitals are so overwhelmed by the influx of patients that they are asking untrained volunteers to help. Details: It’s official! PM Orbán confirms the extension of Covid-19 restrictions in Hungary

The spreading third wave presents a big challenge for Orbán, who said tough lockdown measures could start to ease once the vaccination figure reached 2.5 million people, or a quarter of the population.

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Müller said that the highest number of hospitalised Covid-patients, 625 people, are being treated in the hospitals of Budapest’s Semmelweis University, while another 450 were in the city’s Honvéd hospital.

Fully 542 patients are being treated in Debrecen, in eastern Hungary, 510 in Miskolc, in the north, 444 in Székesheférvár, in the west, and 343 in Győr, in the country’s north-west, she said. All other hospitals across the country have fewer than 300 Covid patients each, she added.

Source: Reuters