The vaccination process in the world has been ongoing for about a month now, and out of the five approved vaccines, more than 41 million people have been vaccinated. Some countries are performing this process faster, some more slowly, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).
The example for the whole world at this moment is Israel, a country that has a little more than nine million people, and 2.6 million citizens have already been vaccinated, which is almost 30 percent of the total population.
When it comes to our region, Croatia and Slovenia are in the lead with about 50 thousand vaccinated citizens, where the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are being used.
Serbia, which is not a member of the European Union (EU), has so far vaccinated about 20.000 people, and it has started mass vaccination on Tuesday. So far, Serbia has procured certain doses of Pfizer vaccines, one million Chinese (Sinopharm), and certain quantities of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, Klix.ba
BiH, meanwhile, has shown readiness for vaccination but that is it. Our country did not start the vaccination process because the government relied on collective buying within the global Covax system. Our state did not even find it necessary to make an effort in time, to legally enable and facilitate the process of negotiating directly with the producer in order to procure certain quantities as soon as possible.
This is why BiH is among the countries that will probably wait until February to start vaccination. The State Minister of Civil Affairs, who is mainly responsible for the coordination process, is telling citizens to be patient.
At the same time, the member of the Presidency of BiH, Milorad Dodik, stated on Tuesday that he would ask the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, to allocate a part of the vaccines to the Republika Srpska in order to start vaccination in that entity.
He pointed out that the Covax mechanism is evidently collapsing.
All of this is perhaps the best image of the situation in BiH. The state was not serious at crucial moments when it was necessary to make the right decisions in order to start procuring vaccines in several different ways. Now, one of the members of the Presidency says that he will ask Serbia for a certain donation. The other two members of the Presidency probably have no one to ask for help, while the state they are supposed to govern remains helpless.
The current situation where BiH expects or hopes for a package of up to 10.000 doses of vaccine, but without further detailed information about the manufacturer and the continuation of immunization, shows that the system is even more confusing.
