The COVID-19 vaccines will be delivered to the Republic of Moldova with delay owing to the great global demand and the insufficiency of such vaccines on the market Alexei Ceban, epidemiologist of the National Public Health Agency, stated for IPN. Earlier, the Ministry of Health announced that the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines will arrive in Chisinau in the middle of February.

“We are fully prepared to receive the vaccines, but we are witnessing a delay because the COVAX platform distributes vaccines to a number of states simultaneously. It is a difficult logistic process. There are intentional factors that we cannot manage from the country. We are discussing the possibility of purchasing and transporting COVID-19 vaccines with a number of partners, such as the WHO, UNICEF, Romania,” said Alexei Ceban.

The epidemiologist noted that about 70% of the country’s population should be immunized for minimizing the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

Moldova will initially receive 24,500 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines and up to 264,000 doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines through the COVAX international platform. The delivery was confirmed by COVAX on January 30.