All the COVID-19 vaccines arriving in the country will be certified and safe. The application plan will be designed according to the distribution plan, said Venko Filipce on Thursday.

We have been communicating intensively with the “Pfizer” company in the past period because at this moment it is the only company that has received the necessary authorization for immediate use of its vaccine from the two most important regulatory bodies, namely the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and from the European Medicines Agency (EMA), added Filipce.

He stressed that the doses for the country have already been reserved and the first batch is expected to arrive next month.

At the same time in the past few days we received information from the COVAX program that those vaccines will arrive in February. It is possible that some of the countries we are communicating with, such as Austria, Bulgaria, Poland and Greece, specifically to allocate some of their own doses, but they clearly indicate that the main problem why it has not been done so far, as an announced mechanism by the European Commission in solidarity not only with our country, but also with other non-EU countries, is the amount they received. Meaning, significantly smaller, about a tenth of what was planned for their countries, said Filipce, answering reporter’ questions after the handover of WHO’s donation to the Institute of Forensic Medicine.