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About 22,000 people traveled to Serbia on Saturday and Sunday, the country with the fastest vaccination campaign in continental Europe. Many of the newcomers were vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine, allowing them to choose a vaccine developed in the West to facilitate qualification for planned vaccine passports.
The initiative has injected around 8,500 doses of vaccines to entrepreneurs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania to help local and regional businesses survive the pandemic, said Marko Cadez, director of the Chamber of Trade from Serbia, who proposed the initiative. .
“It is very important to save our partners, we are all connected in this region,” he said by phone on Monday.
“All of our companies have very closely interconnected supply chains. They are very interdependent. No production can continue if its partners are forced to close, ”he said.
Serbia imported more than 2.8 million. vaccines to its seven million people after the country’s president, Alexander Vucic, agreed to negotiate directly with several manufacturers, including China’s Sinopharm, Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Sputnik V.
Previously, the government also donated several thousand vaccines to its neighbors.
“We will not be able to succeed if people throughout the region are not vaccinated,” Vucicas told reporters, criticizing the slow distribution of vaccines in the European Union. “We are not an island.”
The initiative to vaccinate entrepreneurs and their employees in neighboring countries will continue in the coming days, given the availability of vaccines and infrastructure, Cadez said.
More than 1.4 million have been vaccinated. Serbs, including 920,000 in two doses. Vaccination rates could be accelerated further if the government succeeds in starting producing Chinese and Russian vaccines on the ground as planned.
Although Serbia mainly offers vaccines to its five neighbors, who are also seeking to join the European Union, some people came from EU members, Croatia and Slovenia.
“As a healthy 50-year-old woman, I calculated that it would only be possible to get vaccinated in my home country in the fall,” said Zinka Bardic, a public relations consultant from the Croatian capital, Zagreb, who went to Serbia. get vaccinated.
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