Hungary to cooperate with Israeli firm on Covid-19 test production

Hungary will expand cooperation with a partner Israeli company to include the production of coronavirus testing kits in Hungary, Péter Szijjártó, the minister of foreign affairs and trade, said on Thursday.

Because of the likely emergence of new virus mutations and uncertainty as to how long immunity lasts after a person has been vaccinated, demand for quality test kits is expected to remain high, Szijjártó told MTI from Jerusalem.

The Israeli firm in question started manufacturing “cutting-edge” ventilators in Hungary last spring, Szijjártó said, adding that Hungary has now acquired capacities for the production of another important component in the fight against the pandemic.

Read alsoWhile Hungary orders closing, Israel is taking steps to reopen

EC supports transparency of vaccine contracts

The European Commission supports the transparency of framework agreements signed with vaccine manufacturers, the representative office of the EC in Hungary said on Thursday.

The office reacted to remarks by Gergely Gulyás, the prime minister’s chief of staff, who told a regular news conference earlier in the day that Brussels had “banned” the publication of vaccine procurement contracts by member states.

Gulyás added that he had turned to the commissioner in charge of the matter to allow member states to make the EC’s vaccine contracts publicly available.

In response, the EC office in Budapest said the publication of contracts was not in the EC’s gift, and this was only possible with the approval of contracted partners.

The EC has contacted the companies and asked for their approval to make the contracts available to the public, and three of six framework agreements have been published, blanking out confidential business details, the statement said. They are contracts signed with AstraZeneca, CureVac, and Sanofi-GSK, it added.

The EC is not permitted to make public contract details about the planned and projected volume of shipments, the office said.

Commenting on untapped shipments of Moderna vaccines, Gulyás told the press conference that “we ordered everything that is due to arrive in the first half year but we did not make orders for those shipments available in the second half year, especially towards the end of it.” In response to this issue, the EC office said it had not received any questions by the media and would not provide any information to the media about potential orders of Moderna vaccines from Hungary.

The EC, in cooperation with member states, aims to ensure that Europeans receive secure and effective vaccines and to significantly speed up supplies, the statement said. As a result, an extra four million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be supplied to member states in March and the volume of vaccine shipments will be several times higher in the second quarter than in the first, it added.

Source: MTI