Hungary has lent three hundred thousand doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to Slovenia to speed up its vaccination campaign, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Janez Jansa and Health Minister Janez Poklukar in Ljubljana on Wednesday.
He emphasized that they can help because there are enough vaccines in Hungary to be able to vaccinate everyone who is registered.
“The pandemic made it even clearer to us the importance of interdependence and interdependence with our neighbors,” the politician stressed, adding that the more successfully the neighboring countries defend themselves, the more secure the Hungarians will be.
“That’s why we want our neighbors to be able to vaccinate quickly.”
– he underlined. The sooner the neighbors vaccinate, the faster it is possible to travel between the two countries, and the less likely they are to infect each other, Péter Szijjártó added.
He said they have been facing a world-shattering challenge for a year and a half, one that has put even the health systems of rich and strong countries to the test.
However, a broad consensus has been reached that the only solution to the epidemic is a vaccine. Unfortunately, however, European vaccine procurement has been marred by Brussels, he said. This is not a political opinion, but a truth backed by numbers, he added.
It’s worth seeing how much faster and how much more Americans, Israelis and Britons were able to vaccinate than the European Union, he pointed out. In addition to the quantitative problems, there were also many doubts about the correctness of the distribution mechanism, he said.
“However, Hungary has successfully managed the pandemic. We are at the forefront of Europe in vaccination “
– he told.
This is because Hungary does not consider the vaccine to be an ideological or geopolitical issue. “We see the vaccine as what it is: a tool to save lives,” he underlined.
He believed that the slower and smaller shipments of vaccines did not help the Slovenes either, and that the Central European countries were somehow lagging behind in the distribution mechanism.
“That’s why we’re helping our Slovenian friends now and lending them three hundred thousand AstraZeneca vaccines,” he added.
Puklukar thanked Hungary for the vaccines and, as he said, as they will have the opportunity, by the end of the summer, I would like to return them by autumn at the latest.
“Every dose of vaccine is important to us so that the government’s vaccination plan is feasible,” he stressed. He believed that solidarity between countries is invaluable, it should be built on this in the fight against the epidemic.
Jansa said Slovenia is surrounded by four friendly countries, so it is not alone in the pandemic.
Hungary’s current gesture also proves this fact, he emphasized.
Hungary was better prepared for the epidemic than the European average, so it helped Slovenia last spring, in the first wave of the epidemic, he said.
The Slovenian Prime Minister once again thanked Hungary for the help it provided to Slovenian hospitals last year.
Hungary has performed above average in terms of the speed of vaccinations and the country’s vaccination, Jansa said, congratulating her on the result.
“As Prime Minister of the country holding the Presidency of the Council of the European Union from 1 July.”
MTI
