Georgia may receive 1,000,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine this summer

BioNTech-Pfizer is ready to supply 1 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine to Georgia, the Georgian Formula TV channel has confirmed.

“Negotiations on receiving one million doses of SNS-CoV2 BNT162b2 vaccine have been completed. The company is now finalizing an agreement with the Georgian government”, Pfizer has announced.

The company does not yet specify a delivery date, however, PM Garibashvili stated that the vaccines will most likely be delivered this summer.

In March, Georgia received the first batch of 29,250 doses of the vaccine produced by the American Pfizer company and its German partner BioNTech via the international COVAX platform. This vaccine has been used to vaccine medical workers and citizens over 65 years of age, therefore all doses of Pfizer in Georgia have been exhausted.

The number of age groups for which vaccination is now available has gradually increased. Now all citizens of Georgia over 18 years of age are eligible for a vaccination against the coronavirus.

Since the beginning of the nationwide vaccination program on March 15, 101,415 people have been vaccinated against coronavirus in Georgia, and 15,874 individuals have received both doses of the vaccine.

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The epidemiological situation in Georgia remains uncertain as more than a thousand confirmed cases are registered in the country every day, and the mortality rate stands at approximately 30 people daily. However, the director of the National Center for Disease Control, Amiran Gamkrelidze, believes that the situation will stabilize by the end of May. The curfew in Georgia has been reduced and from May 17, the curfew was amended to start at 23.00 instead of 21:00.

In addition, the vaccination process is slow. Mistrust in vaccines, as well as the management of the vaccination process, have become a serious obstacle to the vaccination process in Georgia and people are forced to travel several hundred kilometers to get vaccinated, even though there are currently several thousand unused doses of vaccine in the country.

At the moment, four vaccines have been imported into the country – the German-American Pfizer, the Anglo-Swedish AstraZeneca, the Chinese Sinopharm (Beijing) and the Chinese Sinovac.

Only three of them – Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Sinopharm, are authorized by the World Health Organization.