The head of the editorial board of the Obozrevatel portal, the president of the Basketball Federation of Ukraine, Mikhail Brodsky, believes that representatives of the Ukrainian authorities have begun “secretly” to vaccinate themselves against COVID-19.
He assures that at the end of last year a batch of Pfizer vaccine was “secretly” delivered to the country by a charter flight, while the medicine was “carried” allegedly without customs clearance, “hiding behind the passport of some deputy”.
“According to the information I have, Prime Minister Denis Shmygal and a number of people’s deputies, including the head of the specialized medical committee of the Verkhovna Rada, Mikhail Radutsky, visited the Mediland plastic surgery and cosmetology clinic during this week, but not only and not so much for an injection of Botox, how much for the first dose of the vaccine”, – Brodsky noted in his blog.
According to him, for two stages of vaccination, these politicians paid two and a half thousand euros (about 220 thousand rubles), while in Europe the price of two doses of the drug is 30 euros (about 2.7 thousand rubles).
In December 2020, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky set a task for the Minister of Health, Maxim Stepanov, to receive a vaccine in January, or at least in February. According to Stepanov, technical documents have already been signed with COVAX for the supply of eight million doses of the vaccine. Later, the Ministry of Health of Ukraine signed a contract for the delivery of another 1.9 million doses of vaccine against coronavirus produced by the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech as soon as possible. While vaccination has not begun in Ukraine, not a single batch of drugs has been delivered to the country.
The Prime Minister of Ukraine Denis Shmygal emphasized that the state cannot use the Russian vaccine against coronavirus, since it has not passed the third stage of clinical trials, and noted that now there is no talk of purchasing a Russian vaccine.
At the same time, the head of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Dmitry Kuleba, called the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against coronavirus Russia’s “hybrid weapon” against Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin drew attention to the fact that supplies of the Russian vaccine against coronavirus to Ukraine are possible, but a request from Kiev is important. The head of the political council of the Ukrainian parliamentary faction “Opposition Platform – For Life” Viktor Medvedchuk is confident that Ukraine’s refusal of the Sputnik V vaccine is a crime and the perpetrators should be held accountable.