Facing public frustration at a slow vaccine roll-out, Kurz said on March 31 Austria would probably order a million Sputnik V doses within a week, but completion of that order still has yet to be announced.
As far as the contract negotiations are concerned, they have been completed, so we do not see that as the big challenge but rather the decisive factor is simply how long EMA needs for approval here.
The government had talked with Pfizer last year about the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines but the two sides did not reach a deal on supply of the vaccine it developed with German partner BioNTech SE.
Argentina is distributing Russia's Sputnik V vaccine as well as doses from China's Sinopharm, the Serum Institute of India, and the UN-led COVAX program.
The regulator said its safety committee "concluded that a warning about unusual blood clots with low blood platelets should be added to the product information" for the J&J shot.
The J&J vaccine won praise for its single dosage and because it does not need to be frozen -- unlike the shots from Moderna and Pfizer -- making distribution much simpler.
The new effectiveness rate is higher than the 91.6% rate outlined in results from a large-scale trial of Sputnik V and published in The Lancet medical journal earlier this year.
Using a database of people who received both doses of the vaccine, scientists at Moscow's Gamaleya Institute, which developed it, calculated a real-world effectiveness rate of 97.6%.
Austria has been in talks with Russia to buy a million doses of the vaccine, and Kurz said on March 31 the order would probably be placed the following week. However, that order has yet to be announced.
Kurz had recently avoided saying whether his country would await EMA approval of the vaccine, which has been used in the European Union only by Hungary so far. EMA has launched a rolling review of Sputnik V.