Serbia to start Covid-19 vaccinations Thursday

BELGRADE: Serbia will begin vaccinating people against Covid-19 on Thursday, President Aleksandar Vucic said Wednesday, making the Balkan state one of the first in Europe to launch a campaign with the Pfizer-BioNTech shot.

Officials said Serbia has received nearly 5,000 doses of the vaccine, which is already in use in the United States and Britain.

Meanwhile European Union countries plan to roll out the vaccine on December 27.

"Vaccination starts tomorrow in Serbia," Vucic told the press, adding that the first jabs would go to the elderly in retirement homes.

"It is important to protect these people... more than 80 percent of the people who have died from this terrible virus are the elderly and they are most at risk," he said.

Serbia, an EU candidate country home to seven million people, has lost almost 2,800 to the novel coronavirus while more than 300,000 have been infected.

Vucic said he hoped for a "massive" vaccination effort to be underway by mid-January, with the aim of vaccinating "hundreds of thousands of people, even a million people" with a first dose.

While Serbia hopes to someday join the EU, the country also nurtures close ties with Moscow and Beijing and plans to add the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine and a jab produced by China's Sinopharm to its arsenal.

The country's drug agency is still examining "samples of the other vaccines", Vucic said.