BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) – A shipment of COVID-19 vaccines produced in China arrived in Hungary on Tuesday, making it the first of 27 European Union countries to receive a Chinese vaccine.
A plane with 550,000 vaccine doses, developed by the Chinese state-owned company Sinopharm, landed at Budapest International Airport after a flight from Beijing. The shipment is enough to treat 275,000 people with the two-dose shot, Dr. Agnes Galgoczy from the National Public Health Center at a press conference.
“With this vaccine, there are now five different types available in Hungary, so we can vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible,” said Galgoczy, adding that vaccination shots will not begin until shipment has been evaluated by the National Public Health Center. .
Hungarian health authorities were the first in the EU to approve the Sinopharm shot for emergency use on January 29. That came after a government decision streamlined Hungary’s vaccine approval process by allowing any vaccine administered to at least 1 million people worldwide to be used without being monitored by the national drug regulatory agency.
The country expects to receive a total of 5 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine over the next four months, enough to treat 2.5 million people out of nearly 10 million people.
Hungarian officials, including Prime Minister Viktor Orban, were critical of the EU’s vaccine procurement program, claiming that the slow rollout of shots costs lives.
“If vaccines don’t come from Brussels, we have to get them from somewhere else … Hungarians cannot be allowed to die simply because Brussels is too slow in getting vaccines,” Orban said last month.
Hungary has also agreed to purchase 2 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, which hospitals began administering in Budapest last week.
On Friday, Orban claimed that these additional vaccines from Russia and China will enable Hungary to vaccinate millions more people at the end of May than other European countries with similar populations.
“As things stand, (we can) vaccinate 6.8 million people by the end of May or the beginning of June,” Orban said in a radio interview. “I think this is huge.”
Orban previously said he would personally choose to be vaccinated with the Sinopharm vaccine because he trusts it the most.
“I think the Chinese have known this virus the longest and probably the best,” he said last month.
The Sinopharm vaccine, which the developer says is nearly 80% effective, is already in use in Hungary’s non-EU neighbor Serbia, where about half a million people, including ethnic Hungarians, have already received the shot. The company has not yet released data on the results of the Phase 3 studies of the vaccine.
The shipment of new vaccines represents about 40% of all COVID-19 vaccine doses Hungary has received to date, making Sinopharm almost as widespread in Hungary as the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.
But recent polls show some Hungarians are reluctant to receive the Sinopharm shot. A survey of 1,000 people in the capital Budapest by pollster Median and the 21 Research Center showed that among those willing to receive a vaccine, only 27% would take a Chinese vaccine, compared to 43% a Russian vaccine and 84% developed a jab in western countries. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.
This story has been corrected to show that about 500,000 people in Serbia have been vaccinated, including ethnic Hungarians, not 500,000 ethnic Hungarians.
Follow all of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak