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Romania is above the European average in terms of performance of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, ahead of countries with better health systems, senior official with the Ministry of Health Andrei Baciu told AGERPRES on Thursday.
"While at the beginning of the week there were reports that Romania is on the 18th place globally in terms of the number of vaccine doses administered and on the sixth place in Europe and today we keep in advanced positions, above the European average, as a performance of the vaccination campaign. (...) We can say that we have surpassed even countries that have much better health systems, health systems with a much more efficient infrastructure, such as France and Belgium. From our data for January 19, I believe Romania is right ahead of Germany in terms of the number of doses administered as a percentage of the population," Baciu said.
He added that such running is the result of sustained efforts made by all those involved in the vaccination campaign, primarily by the health professionals.
"Contrary to the preliminaries that define the health system in Romania, which is not necessarily the best at European level - on the contrary, reports from the European Commission at the end of the year depicts Romania as bringing up the rear in various rankings that look at the performance of the health system - but in this respect, (...) thanks to the sustained efforts made by those involved in conducting the vaccination campaign and, first of all, the health professionals actively involved in the vaccination process Romania ranks above the European average and that is a gratifying signal," said Baciu.
According to him, Romania has made great efforts to roll out and implement "as efficiently as possible" the COVID-19 immunisation campaign when it comes to the number of vaccine doses arriving in the country, according to the distribution made by European Commission.
As of Tuesday, Baciu said, 75 percent of the healthcare workers in the first stage of vaccination were already immunised. He noted that the proportion is expected to increase to over 85% by the end of January.
"We hope to be able to achieve this goal, which Prime Minister Florin Citu has also expressed, so that we can vaccinate 10.4 million people in September," Baciu said.
He added that forecasts show that by the end of March, Romania will receive a total of 2.5 million doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine and 400,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine.
"For starters, there are limited doses, but the number of doses will increase from one week to another. (...) We are waiting for news about the other types of vaccines and, as they receive authorisation, their number will increase," said the senior state healthcare official.
