Serbia’s health minister was administered a shot of the Chinese vaccine made by Sinopharm on Tuesday, which was approved by authorities on Monday evening. A million doses of vaccine arrived in Serbia on Saturday and welcomed by President Aleksandar Vucic at Belgrade Airport. About 20,000 people in Serbia had already been vaccinated before the mass immunization program began on Tuesday. Serbia has purchased three vaccines: made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Russia’s “Sputnik V” and China’s Sinopharm.
CGTN YouTube Channel
Got a comment? Leave your thoughts in the comments section, below. Please note comments are moderated before publication.
About This Source - CGTN
This story is an English language news item from CGTN. CGTN is a Chinese state-funded broadcaster.
BioNTech SE (NASDAQ: BNTX) is a German biotechnology company dedicated to the development and manufacture of active immunotherapies for a patient-specific approach to the treatment of serious diseases.
China is the third largest country in the world by area and the largest country in the world by population. Properly known as the People’s Republic of China, the political territory of the country includes Tibet and Hong Kong. The capital is Beijing.
Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) is an American multinational pharmaceutical corporation headquartered in New York City. In 2012, it was one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and ranked 57 on the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country located in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, and from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in the south.
Russia spans more than one-eighth of the Earth’s inhabited land area, stretching eleven time zones, and bordering 16 sovereign nations. Moscow is the country’s capital.
The Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 and since 1993 Russia been governed as a federal semi-presidential republic. Russia is a major great power, with the world’s second-most powerful military, and the fourth-highest military expenditure. As a recognised nuclear-weapon state, the country possesses the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Serbia, officially the Republic of Serbia, is a landlocked country situated at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe in the southern Pannonian Plain and the central Balkans.
China National Pharmaceutical Group Corp. known as Sinopharm is a Chinese state-owned enterprise. The corporation was the indirect major shareholder of publicly traded companies Sinopharm Group, China Traditional Chinese Medicine. Shanghai Shyndec Pharmaceutical and Beijing Tiantan Biological Products.
Gam-COVID-Vac, trade-named Sputnik V, is a COVID-19 vaccine developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, and registered on 11 August 2020 by the Russian Ministry of Health. It has been approved for distribution in Russia.
The phase III trial for Gam-COVID-Vac was registered on 28 August 2020, and is a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multi-centre clinical trial involving 40,000 volunteers. The phase III trial is scheduled to run until May 2021.
On 5 December 2020, Russia began mass vaccinations in Moscow, with 70 clinics inoculating those most at risk from the virus. Health workers and teachers were said to have priority in the first mass immunisation programme. People who had received injections in the last 30 days or had respiratory diseases in the previous two weeks were excluded, as well as those with certain chronic illnesses, and pregnant and breastfeeding women.
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins.
