EU shares vaccines with Leste and first move from Portugal to Armenia
At a press conference in Brussels, the European Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement, Olivér Várhelyi, accompanied by the Polish Minister for Foreign Affairs, the country that promoted this initiative and will have a coordinating role, announced this “vaccination sharing programme, which an act of solidarity “of the European Union (EU) with its Eastern partners, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, countries where the average vaccination rate is only 28%.
“The first delivery will be 40,000 Pfizer-BionTech vaccines, donated by Portugal to Armenia, and this will be the first share in this framework”, announced the commissioner, specifying that the program is budgeted at 35 million euros, with the EU to cover all costs, from the acquisition of vaccines to their control and administration.
According to the European commissioner, “this is also a very important message ahead of the Eastern Partnership summit”, held on Wednesday in Brussels, on the eve of a European Council, and which Várhelyi hopes will be an opportunity for them to be “many more offers” of vaccines for the Eastern partner countries.
Portugal is among the European countries with the highest vaccination rate against covid-19, having already administered two million booster doses this year, the Directorate-General for Health (DGS) announced on Sunday.
Covid-19 has caused at least 5,300,591 deaths worldwide, among more than 269.02 million infections by the new coronavirus registered since the start of the pandemic, according to the latest report by the Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in several countries.
A new variant, Omicron, classified as “worrying” by the World Health Organization (WHO), has been detected in southern Africa, but since the South African health authorities raised the alert on 24 November, infections have been reported in skin. at least 57 countries from all continents, including Portugal.