Janssen, Pfizer deliveries expected today

Cecilia Muller told the press conference of the operative board handling the epidemic that the latter Johnson and Johnson jab will be mostly used at vaccination buses operated by the Armed Forces.

Muller said the third wave of the pandemic seemed to have plateaued, albeit at a high level. New case numbers have stagnated for over the past few days, she said.

The amount of the virus in waste water is also stagnating overall, she said. The amount of the virus contained in waste water, an indicator of new cases in the coming days, increased in the cities of Eger, Salgotarjan, Szombathely, Veszprem and Pecs, while the amount detected fell in Bekescsaba, Debrecen, Gyor, Szekesfehervar, Zalaegerszeg and Kecskemet.

Hungary to receive 140,000 doses of Sputnik on Tuesday, foreign minister says

A shipment of 140,000 doses of the Sputnik vaccine will arrive in Budapest on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said after talks with Yevgeny Stanislavov, Russia’s incoming ambassador to Hungary.

Talks focused on efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic and related bilateral cooperation, Szijjarto said.

The minister said the number of inoculated Hungarians would reach 3 million “in a few hours”, adding that this would help Hungary to ease restrictions before “almost any other country in Europe”.

Szijjarto said a continuous supply of vaccines was crucial, adding that Tuesday’s shipment would be used as a second shot for people who had already received their first Sputnik jab.

Szijjarto praises response to coronavirus crisis

The Hungarian government’s measures taken to tackle the health and economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic have proved to be effective, the minister of foreign affairs and trade said at the inauguration of a warehousing complex in Szazhalombatta, south of Budapest, on Monday.

Peter Szijjarto said that the government had “not taken the textbook approach; it wanted more than the EU’s vaccine purchases and it did not aim to compensate growing unemployment through providing benefits”.

Instead, the government launched a programme to promote investment and prevented mass unemployment through tying assistance for companies to job retention.

Szijjarto insisted that “if we had applied the leftist, textbook responses forced on us by Brussels, we would now have many thousands more deaths, many tens of thousands more infected, and many hundreds of thousands without jobs”.

The minister welcomed the new complex, an 800 million forint investment by Novochem, a Hungarian firm owned by Germany’s Overlack AG.