The visit to the Balkans of the EU Commissioner for Enlargement, Oliver Varhelyi, on the occasion of the delivery of the first Pfizer/BioNTech doses ended on Wednesday. The EU funded the vaccines with the mediation of Austria thanks to an aid package, which is worth, adopted by the EU Commission last December, reported ANSA on Thursday.
Varhelyi, who began his mission to Serbia on Monday, visited Albania and Kosovo on Wednesday, which will receive 145,000 and 95,000 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines by August, respectively. These vaccines are in addition to those obtained through Covax, the World Health Organization (WHO) initiative to guarantee access to vaccines for middle and low-income countries of which the EU is one of the prominent donors.
The Balkan countries, except Serbia, mainly relied on the WHO mechanism, but the delivery delays prompted Brussels to seek a bridging solution to guarantee the vaccines necessary to protect health personnel and more fragile sections of the population. /argumentum.al
