SARAJEVO: Bosnia plans to order Russian and Chinese-made coronavirus vaccines fearing that deliveries ordered under the COVAX scheme for poor countries and from the European Union will be too little too late, officials said on Thursday.
Inoculations in the Western Balkans have begun in Serbia, which has directly ordered Pfizer/BioNTech, Russian Sputnik V and Chinese Sinopharm vaccines.
But Bosnia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo have not received any vaccines as yet. Albania has received some.
Bosnia has ordered 1.2 million vaccines under the COVAX scheme and nearly 900,000 vaccines from the EU for its two autonomous regions, the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic, and expects the first batch to arrive soon, Prime Minister Zoran Tegeltija said. Bosna applied for EU membership in 2016.
The COVAX scheme, led by the World Health Organization and GAVI vaccine alliance, is due to start rolling out vaccines to poor and middle-income countries in February, with 2 of 3…