France To Ship Vaccines To Hard-hit Czechs: Report

Fahad Shabbir (@FahadShabbir) Published February 25, 2021 | 11:10 PM

Prague, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 25th Feb, 2021 ) :France will give 100,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to the struggling Czech Republic by mid-March, Prime Minister Andrej Babis said Thursday.

"We were trying to get extra vaccines for some time. We got them as a gift from Israel. France has now promised 100,000 doses as of March 15," Babis told the CTK news agency on Thursday.

The Czech Republic tops the world in terms of new infections per 100,000 people over the last 14 days and is second only to neighbouring Slovakia in new deaths, according to an AFP tally.

The local pace of Covid-19 vaccinations, which the EU member of 10.

7 million people kicked off in late December, is slower than expected, with 600,000 jabs given by Thursday.

Babis said he had also asked other EU members for help. His spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

On Tuesday, Babis's office announced the Czech Republic had received 5,000 doses of the US-made Moderna vaccine from Israel as a gift.

He did not say whether the French batch would be a gift or whether the Czech Republic will have to reciprocate when it has sufficient supply of its own.

"We have no information to this effect either," Katerina Etrychova from the French embassy in Prague told AFP.