A news from my home country Bulgaria and how EU countries have been forced to buy huge quantities of vaccines against covid-19 for years.
Huge financial resource: Another 2.8 million doses of vaccine against COVID-19 to be scrapped
Bulgaria must buy vaccines against COVID-19 until 2025 in huge quantities, but has raised the issue with the European Commission to terminate the contract, Health Minister Asen Medzhidiev explained to BNT.
"Not only do we have vaccines to scrap, but we've already scrapped huge amounts, we're going to scrap another 2,800,000 doses this year. This is a huge financial resource. I was categorical before the European Commission that Bulgaria is firmly in favor of terminating the contract with Pfizer for the purchase of vaccines," said the Minister of Health.
Medzhidiev said Bulgaria has called on the European Commission to end a contract with BioNTech/Pfizer under which his country is obliged to buy coronavirus vaccines until 2025.
"In my online conversation with the European Commissioner for Health, I was quite critical and categorical that it is not image-worthy, even for the European Union, to be forced to purchase vaccines and, even after delivering them, to have to destroy them," Asen Medjidiev pointed out.
According to him, with the funds we pay for the purchase and destruction of these vaccines, we will build a children's hospital and the rest will be for the children's centers in the villages.
Last year, 2.3 million paid vaccines against coronavirus were discarded in Bulgaria, and this year it is expected to be 2.8 million. These are medicinal products and money in the wind. We will scrap over 5 million COVID-19 vaccines in two years". This was stated by the adviser to the Minister of Health, Arkady Sharkov.
He pointed out that the last contract for the vaccines against COVID-19 was signed in 2021, when the epidemiological situation was much different, and this led to the ordering of large quantities of them. The EU should stop buying vaccines.
He also recalled the lawsuit filed by the New York Times for refusing to provide the communication between the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and a representative of Pfizer. The publication is asking for the documents because of doubts that the EC has contracted larger quantities than necessary.