U.S. pharmaceutical Pfizer will provide another batch of 10 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to Ukraine, Health Minister Maksym Stepanov announced on May 1. The additional doses come on top of up to 10 million doses that Pfizer agreed to supply to the country in April.
“That is, we will receive a total of 20 million doses of Pfizer vaccine this year,” Stepanov said.
Ukraine will receive the first 500,000 doses in May-June 2021, 4.5 million doses in July-September, and the remaining 15 million doses before the end of the year.
The COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is 91% effective in preventing the disease and 100% effective against the latest South African coronavirus strain.
The company also says that its vaccine is 100% effective in preventing the disease among adolescents aged 12 to 15 years old.
President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the CEO of Pfizer for helping Ukraine, adding that now the government’s task is to ensure the vaccination of the maximum number of citizens.
“It is also necessary to more actively explain to people the importance of vaccination against COVID-19, because this is the only way to overcome the pandemic, return to normal life and forget about quarantine forever,” Zelensky said in a statement on May 1.
A little more than two months into the immunization campaign, launched on Feb. 24, only 752,295 people in Ukraine have received the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine; 260 people received two doses of the vaccine.
The vaccination campaign has been struggling to pick up pace due to difficult logistics and disinformation-fueled distrust. In March, Bloomberg estimated that, at this pace, it might take Ukraine 10 years to get 75% of its population vaccinated.
Zelensky signed a decree on April 4, ordering the development of a national plan for vaccination of most adults against COVID-19 by the end of 2021.
Additionally, Ukraine is expecting 1.5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India. However, the delivery is at risk, since India temporarily halted its exports because of the country’s own demand for vaccines.
The Ukrainian government has also recently received 215,000 doses of the Chinese-made vaccine CoronaVac but it has not started to use it as it still needs to be approved by the Ukrainian government and the World Health Organization.
