Bulgaria’s Health Minister: Reduced AstraZeneca deliveries will not disrupt vaccination plan
Bulgaria’s national vaccination plan will not be disrupted by the reduced deliveries of the AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19, Health Minister Kostadin Angelov said on January 23.
The BBC reported that AstraZeneca said a production problem meant the number of initial doses available to EU countries would be lower than expected.
AstraZeneca has informed the EU that it will cut supplies of its Covid-19 vaccine to the union by 60 per cent to 31 million doses in the first quarter of the year.
Bulgaria ordered 4.5 million doses of the drug, and the first delivery was to be half a million doses. The EU is expected to approve the vaccine for use on January 29.
Angelov said that more than 30 per cent of teaching and non-teaching staff at schools, as well as residents of old-age homes, had said that they wanted to be vaccinated against Covid-19.
He said that his ministry was proposing a gradual easing of measures, starting with planned admissions in health care.
“We will now loosen the measures in the culture and sports sectors and then observe for 14 days what the trend will be to see what we will take as the next step,” Angelov said.
“The good thing is that we are getting our lives back the way they were. All the public discussions in different industries make me happy, because it means that we have forgotten those conversations about insufficient ambulances, insufficient number of beds and delayed patients. This is a success,” he said.
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