Bulgaria to put Janssen Covid-19 vaccine into use
Bulgaria is to put the Janssen vaccine against Covid-19 into use, Chief State Health Inspector Angel Kunchev said on April 26 at a news conference after a meeting of the national vaccination headquarters.
Six days earlier, the European Medicines Agency said that the overall benefits of Covid-19 Vaccine Janssen in preventing Covid-19 outweigh the risks of side effects.
Kunchev said that Bulgaria had been awaiting the decision by the US Food and Drug Administration, which was positive.
He said that seven more European countries had decided in favour of using the Janssen vaccine without restrictions, and Bulgaria had made the same decision.
Bulgaria expects a delivery of 14 000 doses of the Janssen vaccine on April 28.
“It will be distributed during the holiday period and we will start using it through all possible channels,” Kunchev said.
He said that consideration was being given to using the Janssen vaccine for tourism industry staff and among the Roma population.
Kunchev said that 80 000 people in Bulgaria’s tourism industry so far had declared that they wanted to be vaccinated against Covid-19, and directing part of the deliveries of the Janssen vaccine to the tourism industry would enable the immunisation process to begin before the summer season.
“We are using the advantage that this vaccine is a single dose and immediately after it is administered, a document can be issued, and it would be known that people working in the industry are protected,” he said.
Separately, the Health Ministry said that on April 26, 138 060 doses of the BioNTech-Pfizer and 14 400 of the AstraZeneca vaccines arrived in Bulgaria. The doses were immediately distributed to the regional health inspectorates.
On April 25, a total of 21 600 doses of the Moderna vaccine against Covid-19 arrived in Bulgaria.
Deliveries to Bulgaria of about 5.5 million doses of vaccines against Covid-19 are expected by the end of June, Medicines Agency head Bogdan Kirilov said in an interview with Bulgarian National Television on April 21.
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