Chinese Covid-19 vaccine’s production ‘safe’, says Hungarian official

Production of the Chinese Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine is going on under safe conditions, a senior official of Hungary’s National Institute of Pharmacy and Nutrition (OGYEI) said on Monday morning.

The vaccine is being produced in a factory using highly modern technology in Beijing, Ferenc Lukács, the head of the authority’s inspection department, told public news broadcaster M1 from the site.

It requires additional inspection to verify the degree of effectiveness of the drug, he said.

Gergely Gulyás, who heads the Prime Minister’s Office, told a press briefing on Thursday that Hungary had “practically reached an agreement” on a delivery of the Sinopharm vaccine. He added that the first shipment could be as large as one million doses, pending approval by Hungarian authorities.

As we wrote yesterday, “Brussels is not delivering vaccine fast enough nor is it delivering enough vaccine to Hungary,” the Government Information Centre said in a statement, details HERE.

Read alsoEurope ‘lining up’ for Chinese vaccine, says Hungarian government

UPDATE

Meanwhile, the opposition Democratic Coalition has called on OGYEI “not to yield to the government’s devious political pressure” to license the Chinese vaccine.

“DK fully support vaccination, but it is in our common interest that a premium category vaccine inspected and approved by the EU is put to use in Hungary rather than one developed under an outdated protocol in China,”

Zoltán Varga, the party’s parliamentary group spokesman, told an online press conference.

He said DK could only consider vaccine approvals issued by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to be “politically and professionally independent”.

Varga said his party was proposing offering Hungarians the option to choose the vaccine they would prefer to be inoculated with. He made reference to studies suggesting that only one percent of Hungarians are keen on getting the Chinese jab.

“The vaccine which is given to people aged between 18 and 59 in China is planned to be given to people aged older than 60 here in Hungary,” he said.