Ukraine has received almost 370,000 new doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID19.
As a part of the COVAX facility aid, Ukraine has received a new batch of 367,200 doses of the AztraZeneca-SKBio vaccine produced in South Korea. The shipment came in today, according to Unain.
“Ukraine has undertaken ambitious targets to ensure COVID-19 vaccination for most of the adult population until the end of the year. This is a huge challenge, and we’re looking forward to the parallel launch of various platforms, the use of various vaccines, and all possible supply routes to achieve this goal,” Ukrainian Deputy Health Minister and Chief Medical Officer Viktor Liashko said.
Ukraine does not have to pay for the vaccines, since they come through the COVAX programme. Acquiring vaccines is a challenge for a country such as Ukraine because of the relatively small economy of the otherwise huge country.
Scepticism remains
However, a larger problem than acquiring vaccines is, that many Ukrainians continue to be reluctant to actually take the vaccine. Not just the COVID19 vaccine, but vaccines in general have a long way from the lab and into the arms of Ukrainians.
The recent stories about AztraZeneca vaccines being potentially dangerous have not helped the situation. According to AFP, even hospital workers in Ukraine do not want the vaccine. They quote one Dr. Yuriy Shylenko from hospital Number Five in Kyiv:
“Out of 40 people who initially wanted to be vaccinated, only 10 still do,” said Shylenko. “They want to be vaccinated, but they want to know what will happen first and what the result will be like.”
Thousands of cases
The number of daily registered cases of COVID19 still rests comfortably above 10,000. As of today at 9 PM, Ukraine registered 14,277 new cases of COVID 19 in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total number of registered cases over 2 million.
Positive is it, though, that while 14,000 people caught the virus, 18,965 recovered bringing down the total number of active cases. 434 died, and Ukraine is now the country in Europe with second most deaths.
41,700 people have died since the onset of the pandemic. Only 41,305 PCR tests were conducted, meaning around a third of the tests were positive. 508,044 have received the first shot of the vaccine; 16,169 of them today.
