Greek Communist Party Calls On Authorities To Buy All Safe, Effective COVID-19 Vaccines

The Greek government should purchase all COVID-19 vaccines that are deemed safe and effective, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (CPG) Dimitris Koutsoumpas said on Thursday

ATHENS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 04th February, 2021) The Greek government should purchase all COVID-19 vaccines that are deemed safe and effective, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (CPG) Dimitris Koutsoumpas said on Thursday.

"The disruption of the vaccination program as a result of EU policy and of the competition of [pharmaceutical] companies requires the government to implement a proposal that, from the very first moment, was made by the CPG secure direct access to all available international vaccines that are deemed safe and effective to ensure sufficient and prompt mass vaccination of the population," Koutsoumpas said in a statement, received by Sputnik.

Earlier in January, Marios Themistokleous, the health ministry's secretary general for Primary health care, said that Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine supplies had to have resumed. Before that Pfizer said that it was delaying vaccine shipments for three to four weeks because of work to increase capacity at its Belgian processing plant.

According to Themistokleous, Greece received 100,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on January 25 and expects another 815,000 doses by the end of February, to be followed by 1,415,000 doses by the end of March.

Themistokleous said that Greece is also expecting AstraZeneca vaccine deliveries, as well as vaccine supplies from Moderna.

Meanwhile, there is a growing interest in Russia's Sputnik V vaccine in Greece, after the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet published an interim analysis from the phase 3 trial of the Russian vaccine, showing its 91.6 percent efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19.

On Friday, official spokesperson of the Greek government Christos Tarantilis said that Greece did not rule out the use of the Russian vaccine once it is approved by the European Medicine Agency.