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Prime Minister Florin Citu on Monday stated that Romania cannot afford to waste even one dose of COVID-19 vaccine and specified that the information according to which 70,000 people would have been immunized without being scheduled is "unsupported" by the actual data, as reported by AGERPRES.
"Here things must be very clear: we do not allow ourselves to waste any dose of vaccine. (...) This information, as I understood from Mr Gheorghita, is not supported by the actual data. The data show that there were almost 1,000 or so people who have been vaccinated and 1,300 people outside the country. So we cannot talk of 70,000, since they are 1,300 and I think that there is an explanation for each case. I repeat, for us, it's very important to have as many people as possible vaccinated. This is, in fact, the only purpose of the vaccination campaign. And not to have discussions about X or Y being vaccinated. We need to vaccinate as many people as possible, this is the only way we can eliminate the pandemic," said Citu, before the meeting of the Executive Bureau of the PNL (National Liberal Party).
He pointed out that the rescheduling for vaccination due to the manufacturer's non-compliance with the delivery schedule is already done.
"The rescheduling has already been done, so we cannot talk of any rescheduling right now. The doses that come today are already scheduled. The situation that Romania is going through related to the vaccines is the same for everyone. Under these conditions, however, Romania manages to vaccinate faster than "many countries in the EU. And we will keep this up. You know very well that AstraZeneca was approved in February. We will receive from AstraZeneca, I don't know, like 800,000 vaccines, they will come in February. We are starting to reach the pace we wanted. We will maintain this pace, and Mr Gheorghita said the same. Our target is to have 10.4 people vaccinated by the end of September, with two doses each, explained the Prime Minister.
Florin Citu stated that any additional dose to be received will be given with priority to people over 65 years old.
"This can only be done if additional doses come from Pfizer or Moderna. The ones from AstraZeneca are for people under 55, so they can't get into this strategy. If additional doses come and if Pfizer supplements this month what it reduced last week, of course that people over 65 will have priority during this period, but we still don't have this information and we cannot talk about a change of strategy at the moment," he said.
