Russian vaccine to be used first in Budapest

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Photo: www.facebook.com/Szijjártó Péter

Inoculations in Hungary using the Russian Sputnik V vaccine will start in Budapest, the chief medical officer said on Tuesday.

As we wrote a before, tests of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, conducted by public health authority NNK, have yielded good results which means that “Sputnik V can be used in Hungary from now on”, the chief medical officer told public media on Sunday.

Cecília Müller told a press conference that 560 GPs in the city will each be asked to select five of their patients who do not suffer from any chronic underlying illnesses, who would then be referred to vaccination points to receive the jab. Fully 2,800 doses of the Russian vaccine are currently available, she said. She added that a further amount of the vaccine enough to inoculate 20,000 people were undergoing laboratory testing before use.

GPs will also be using the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine this week, Müller said, adding that 85,410 doses of that vaccine were expected to arrive on Thursday, alongside 21,600 doses of Moderna.

Family practitioners will also start inoculating patients with chronic illnesses aged between 18 and 60 with the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, Müller said.

Fully 2,040 GPs will receive doses for 10 patients each, she said.

So far, 291,396 people have received at least one shot, while 110,395 people have been fully inoculated, she said.

Müller warned that though the figures indicated an improving tendency, “the ratio of positive cases within all tests is increasing”. The number of those in hospital and patients on ventilators have also increased, she said, adding that traces of the virus in sewage water were stagnating or increasing. “This gives cause for some concern,” she said.

The British variant of the virus has so far been detected in 24 samples, while the Brazilian or South African variants have not been reported, Müller said.