Health Minister Alexandru Rafila emphasized on Wednesday the need to scale down the amount of Covid vaccine contracted by Romania so as not to allow millions of euros go lost, according to Agerpres.

„The government must take a decision and together with the European Commission and the vaccine suppliers we have a contract with we must find a formula to allow on the one hand the supply of those vaccines adapted to the strains currently in circulation, for everyone who wishes to get the jab to be able do so, because this is actually the problem, and on the other hand to find a solution to drastically reduce the amount of contracted vaccine, because we would have to shell out hundreds of millions of euros on vaccines that we will no longer use. I find this immoral in the first place. This is unacceptable in a period of major economic crisis (…). If we end up destroying millions of doses of unused vaccine we pay a whopping amount for, the people’s trust in vaccination can be very seriously affected,” Rafila explained at radio broadcaster Europa FM.

„The contracted quantity is so large that we cannot use it. Let me give you two examples: alone this year over 11 million doses of Pfizer vaccine should arrive, that is leaving aside next year’s contract, and we are trying to cut this amount to three million; then there are 4.5 million doses of Moderna we should also receive. Here again we have a problem because Moderna was used quite scarcely in Romania, just 1 million doses, meaning that 400,000 people got vaccinated with dose one and dose two, and another 200,000 with the third dose,” Rafila pointed out.

According to the health official, people at risk of developing complicated forms of the disease can be immunized with dose 3 or 4 with one of the available vaccines.

Agerpres