From an ideological and geopolitical standpoint, the EU’s approach to vaccine approval is a major blunder, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó stated in an interview, TASS reports.
Szijjártó strongly believes that the European Commission made a major blunder when it looked at vaccinations from an ideological and geopolitical standpoint from the start.
The foreign minister went on to say that “if a doctor issued a patient a prescription before the epidemic, the patient went to the pharmacy and bought the medicine without thinking about who made it or where it came from. The question of who created the vaccination is a relatively new one.”
Szijjártó emphasized that Hungarian specialists have reached a consensus on the safety and efficacy of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, which is used to vaccinate the country’s population, among other things.
A vaccination is a method to save lives, which is why, in order to have these vaccinations licensed in Hungary, Hungarian experts traveled to Russia and China to examine the manufacturing of their medications and to study hundreds of pages of paperwork for these vaccines, the minister stressed.
Szijjártó further said that he believes Brussels still sees geopolitical and ideological meaning in vaccination, while the WHO has approved the Chinese drug Sinopharm.
“However, some European countries did not show any enthusiasm in this regard – they, on the contrary, criticized the organization,” the Foreign Minister summed up.
“From my point of view, this is pretty hypocritical,” he said.
Hungary is the first EU member to receive samples of the Sputnik V vaccine for study in November 2020. The Russian medication was ultimately approved by a Hungarian specialized healthcare organization in February 2021, and it was then used to vaccinate the populace. In addition to the Russian vaccine, the country employs medicines made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, as well as American corporations Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca.
