Serbia handed over nearly 5,000 doses of a Covid-19 vaccine to North Macedonia on Sunday, allowing it to launch its vaccination campaign while awaiting the delivery of its own orders.
A Balkan country of 7 million inhabitants, Serbia boasts the highest vaccination rate in continental Europe, the second largest vaccination rate among European countries, after the United Kingdom.
“This is the act of enormous solidarity (…) of the Serbian people with the Macedonian people,” Prime Minister of North Macedonia Zoran Zaev told reporters during a handover ceremony. vaccines at the Tabanovce border post.
This first delivery of 4,680 doses of the American-German Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is part of a donation totaling 8,000 doses, “pending the arrival of the vaccines that we have ordered,” Zaev said.
North Macedonia, a country of two million inhabitants, relied mainly on deliveries by the UN Covax system and by a European Union program.
In the absence of these deliveries, announced for March by the Covax system, Skopje signed on February 8 an agreement with the Chinese company Sinopharme for the delivery at the end of February of 200,000 doses of its vaccine.
In this small country, nearly 97,000 people have been infected to date and the Covid-19 has killed nearly 3,000 there, the death rate among the highest in the world.
“I am happy that the citizens of North Macedonia can start vaccination. I am happy to be able to help our brothers and our friends, ”Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said at the ceremony.
The vaccination campaign will start Wednesday in North Macedonia. These first doses will be administered to healthcare workers most exposed to the virus, according to the Macedonian Ministry of Health.
Serbia, which launched the immunization of its population on December 24, shortly before the European Union, has so far vaccinated 635,000 people, of which 205,000 have been revaccinated, the Serbian president said on Sunday.
His country has so far received nearly 2 million doses of vaccines against Covid-19, in particular 1.5 million doses of the Chinese vaccine, but also the Pfizer-BioNTech and Sputnik V vaccines.
The first 150,000 doses of the Anglo-Swedish vaccine AstraZeneca should arrive in the country in the coming days, according to Mr. Vucic.