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BUDAPEST, Feb 5 (Reuters) - The Czech Republic may consider
using vaccines not yet registered in the EU to speed up
inoculations, Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on Friday, on a
trip to Hungary which has given emergency approval to Russian
and Chinese vaccines.
He said he had also spoken about the issue with German
officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, who he said
wanted Russian or Chinese vaccines to be given European
approval.
European Union countries' governments are facing a reckoning
over vaccination programmes that have lagged far behind the
United States and former EU member Britain.
Hungary so far is the only EU member to have given emergency
use approval to Chinese and Russian vaccines. Other EU countries
have followed the European regulator EMA, which has so far
approved only three vaccines from Western companies.
"I have spoken about the Russian vaccine, and about the
Chinese vaccine, with Chancellor Merkel, and the chancellor as
well as the Bavarian prime minister are unambiguously calling
for this vaccine to be approved by the European Medicines Agency
(EMA)," Babis said after meeting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor
Orban.
"Now of course the issue is whether the producer asks for
the approval or not, and we of course want to consider, if we
get hold of the vaccine, to go the similar way as Hungary did
because time is of essence."
Babis did not respond to a request for further comment.
Prior to his trip to Budapest, he said he aimed to discuss
Russia's Sputnik V vaccine with Orban.
Czech authorities had until Friday insisted on EMA clearance
for any vaccine to be used in the country.
Peer-reviewed late-stage trial results of Sputnik V
published in The Lancet international medical journal this week
showed it was almost 92% effective in fighting COVID-19.
Russia has shared data from its Phase III trial with
regulators in several countries and has begun the process of
submitting it to the EMA for approval in the European Union.
China has produced two vaccines, from Sinopharm and Sinovac,
and has been exporting millions of doses of each of them around
the world, mainly to developing countries.
The Czech Republic has suffered one of the world's highest
infection and death rates, with 16,976 deaths in the population
of 10.7 million.
It has so far administered 327,759 vaccine doses from
Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, mostly to citizens over the age of
80 and health workers, and expects the first shipment of
AstraZeneca vaccines on Saturday.
(Reporting by Gergely Szakacs in Budapest, Jan Lopatka and
Robert Muller in Prague)
