DK calls on government to release details on use of Pfizer vaccine
Turkey to accept Hungarian immunity certificates
Earlier, Hungary reached agreements on mutual recognition of immunity certificates with Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia and Bahrain. Romania also honours Hungarian immunity certificates and vice versa.
DK calls on government to release details on use of Pfizer vaccine
The Democratic Coalition (DK) has called on the government to release details about the number of Pfizer-BioNTech shots administered so far, the number of jabs held for second vaccination and the number of reserves currently in storage.
Despite a reported 2.8 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine having arrived in Hungary by early May, the public perception is that it is not available or very hard to get, he added.
Arato said he would present a written question to clarify, “why they keep hiding from the people” the vaccine that attracts the highest level of trust. If the cabinet purposefully holds back a significant volume of vaccine, it is an irresponsible, anti-vaxxer attitude, he added.
Szijjarto: WHO approval of Sinopharm marks ‘collapse of liberal propaganda campaign’
The World Health Organisation’s decision last week to list the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine for emergency use marks “the collapse of the liberal propaganda campaign launched against it”, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Monday.
Szijjarto told Hungarian press during a break in a one-day meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels that WHO’s Friday approval created a new situation in the fight against the pandemic, ahead of the approaching global health meeting of G20 countries.
“From now on, the campaign against the Sinopharm vaccine and countries that use the Sinopharm vaccine should be discontinued,” Szijjarto said. “The extremely irresponsible policies that attempted to discourage tens or hundreds of thousands of people from taking up vaccination should also come to an end,” he added.
“The WHO decision makes it clear that those who saw the Chinese vaccine as a geopolitical and ideological issue were wrong and those who saw it as a tool to save lives were right,” he said. The approval of Sinopharm has caused serious confusion in Brussels because there are no longer reasonable arguments against it, he said.
Szijjarto said that over the past few months the Chinese vaccine had helped guarantee the safety of hundreds of thousand Hungarians. As lives can only be saved through vaccines, those who generated distrust in jabs have put human lives at risk, he said.
The minister said that under the valid contracts Hungary would receive another 1.7 million doses of Sinopharm. In terms of inoculation, the member of the Eastern Partnership and the Western Balkan countries are in a much worse position than the EU countries. Hungary will therefore airlift the vaccines collected by Poland to the Eastern Partnership members, Szijjarto said.
He added that Hungary would provide at least 6,000 doses of vaccine to the North Macedonian border police that play a key role in halting migration. Szijjarto also announced that Hungary would receive 200,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine.
Kasler: Improving working conditions for ambulances primary task
The government and the Ministry of Human Resources consider improving the working conditions for ambulance services a highlighted task, the human resources minister said on Monday, marking the day of the ambulance services in Hungary.
The coronavirus epidemic has posed the greatest challenge to the services since they were set up, assisting in some 152,000 cases and collecting over 1.2 million samples, he said.
Last year, ambulance services covered nearly 42 million kilometres and carried out more than 1,800 successful resuscitations, Kasler said and thanked the 8,500 ambulance workers for their outstanding performance.
