Zoran Tegeltija, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), stated yesterday that the state meets the conditions needed for accepting coronavirus vaccines, and that it has written proof for that, but that the supplier buys time so he could sell it to others at different prices.
Tegeltija said that it is not true that BiH does not meet the conditions for accepting vaccines and that now it can receive a million doses of vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech company, which has the most complicated conditions for the acceptance, Klix.ba writes
“I believe that Pfizer just wants to buy time and that it wants to sell those vaccines to others at completely different prices than the ones we have paid,” added Tegeltija.
Tegeltija claims that BiH has paid for 1.230.000 doses of vaccines and that he expects those who have pledged themselves to respect those agreements.
”They should follow the contracts, and not to buy time, they set conditions that have never been set and we do not want them to behave like this. They must deliver vaccines to us at the Airport in Sarajevo, while everything else is on BiH and we are ready for that, ” he emphasized.
He said that the aggravating circumstance for BiH in this whole process is that the agreement that was signed in September last year defines that the deadline for deliveries of these vaccines to be the end of the first quarter of this year.
“At the time we signed the contracts, everyone was saying that vaccines would arrive in the first quarter. Since there were some good actions by the health sector, vaccines appeared earlier and it seems to me that an attempt to buy time is happening right now,” Tegeltija added.
He stated that it was unacceptable and that they had no right to blackmail anyone.
“We have paid for 1.230.000 vaccines, they promised us 27.000 vaccines and now they are buying time again. It is about time for us to stop being nice to them and it is their obligation to deliver to us what we paid them a long time ago while meeting all the preconditions to accept those vaccines, ” he told.
He assessed that no changes in the law are needed for BiH to procure the vaccines, and stressed that the Republika Srpska (RS) has already imported the first quantities of vaccines and that it expects new procurements.
Tegeltija noted that it is not disputable that the Ministry of Civil Affairs appears in those negotiations on behalf of BiH, that it was in negotiations with both Russia and China, and the fact that the whole process, ie technical payment and vaccination, is taken over by the entities.
To recall, it was announced the other day by the journalists that BiH will receive 23.400 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines through the global initiative COVAX if it meets the necessary requirements, but that it has not met them yet.
Specifically, it is stated that according to Pfizer’s detailed analyzes for each country, BiH has not completed its obligations. This primarily refers to the conditions of the ultra-cold chain for the storage of vaccines, as well as the obligations from the legal and administrative aspects.
