Hungary has delivered 200,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccines each to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to Montenegro with a view to speeding up their inoculation campaigns and contributing to relaunching their economies, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said.
Szijjártó said in Sarajevo that the Hungarian government had done everything in its power to procure as many vaccines as possible and had managed to quickly restart the country’s economy thanks to its inoculation campaign. Hungary’s shipment of Sinopharm vaccines is the largest either of the countries have received yet, Szijjártó noted. “Hungary and the Western Balkans have mutual dependence in economic and security areas, and also in stemming migration … This is one of the reasons we are happy to aid your pandemic protection,” Szijjártó said. “We hope that a speedy inoculation campaign will contribute to a faster relaunch of the economy and boost stability, so you can curb waves of illegal migration.”
Zoran Tegeltija, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s prime minister, thanked Hungary for the shipment and said that the vaccines, which brought the total number of doses in the country to 900,000, will be used primarily to vaccinate the most vulnerable groups. The country is expecting to receive a further 2,000,000 vaccines in the second half of the year, enough for half of the population to receive both doses, he said. As a new wave of the pandemic is expected to hit in the autumn, the vaccination drive should proceed as fast as possible until then, Tegeltija warned.
Later on Monday, Szijjártó presented the shipment for Montenegro in Podgorica. He said the pandemic was proof that in a crisis, national measures are always more effective than international institutions end mechanisms.
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