Malta spent close to €100 million on COVID-19 vaccines alone, Health Minister Chris Fearne said on Saturday.
He said most of this cost was subsidised by the European Union and the bulk of this cost will be recouped.
Speaking on Andrew Azzopardi’s radio show on 103 Malta’s Heart, Fearne explained that Malta had enough vaccine doses booked for 2022 and 2023 as the country was expecting to administer additional doses to those who were first to get vaccinated when the vaccines first became available. Fearne said the booster dose would be given either at the beginning of winter or early in 2022.
Fearne said that while a number of variants of concern had been isolated once they were located, these variants were covered by the vaccine and those who had to be concerned about them were those who have not yet been vaccinated.
He explained that the vaccines which have been approved so far by the European Medicines Agency were covering these variants too. However, studies were still required to see their effectiveness with new emerging variants and those variants which may emerge in the future.
On the variant first found in India, Fearne said this had not reached Malta’s shores but stressed that the vaccine being administered in Malta were effective against this variant too.
He explained that in many countries which had not reached herd immunity, such as Bulgaria where only 15 per cent of the population, the Indian variant could spread quickly. Malta had vaccinated 72 per cent of those eligible for the vaccine.
He noted that the spread of the coronavirus in the community can only be controlled by vaccinating as many people as possible and reaching herd immunity.
Fearne referred to a new legal notice which lays down that travellers to Malta must present a vaccination certificate or negative PCR test results at their departure point as from Tuesday, June 1. Passengers are requested to provide a valid vaccination certificate showing they have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or present a negative Polymerase Chain Reaction test performed not longer than 72 hours before that person’s arrival in Malta.
Should they still be allowed to board, passengers will have to foot the cost of a PCR test in Malta, as well as accommodation expenses to cover quarantine.
Asked about problems created by vaccine producers AstraZeneca, Fearne said Malta was not affected by what was happened on a European level.
The European Union started legal proceedings against AstraZeneca over its failure to deliver the doses it had committed to deliver in contracts signed with the EU. The EU is suing AstraZeneca to force it to deliver 90 million more doses of its coronavirus vaccine before July, arguing that the company failed in its contractual duty by handing over only a fraction of the promised shots.
Fearne said that Malta had its own agreements with other pharmaceutical companies and that the vaccine shortages did not have an impact on Malta’s vaccination roll-out.