Ukraine Appoints New Health Minister To Speed Up COVID Vaccinations
RFE
20 May 2021, 19:45 GMT+10
Ukraine s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, has named a new health minister, who immediately pledged to speed up the country s sluggish vaccination campaign.
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Former Deputy Health Minister Viktor Lyashko was promoted to replace Maksym Stepanov, who was fired this week after Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal
blamed him for a lack of vaccine doses.
Ukraine is one of the European countries worst affected by the pandemic and its vaccination campaign has been lagging.
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Ukraine vaccinated 70,469 people on April 28, Chief Sanitary Doctor and Deputy Health Minister Viktor Lyashko announced. The figure is more than triple the previous daily record of 19,858 vaccinations, set on April 9.
This means that a total of 629,184 vaccinations have been given in Ukraine, with only 10 people having received two shots (of whom two received their first dose abroad).
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Jonny Tickle The first shipment of Indian-made doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine has arrived in Ukraine, ending months of waiting after Kiev failed to obtain jabs from the West. The country s inoculation program has now begun.
According to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s website, Deputy Health Minister Viktor Lyashko informed the head of state that the vaccine was registered in the country a day before half a million doses arrived at Kiev s Boryspil Airport from India, where they are being produced under license from AstraZeneca with the name
“CoviShield.”
The vaccination program will begin with doctors and then be expanded to include military personnel and members of the National Guard. The first jab was administered at midday Wednesday, with an emergency room doctor from the country s central Cherkasy region being the lucky recipient.
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KYIV (Reuters) - A Ukrainian pharmaceutical company backed by a prominent Russian-leaning opposition figure has applied for state approval to make Russia’s Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, a sensitive move given toxic relations between Kyiv and Moscow.
The two countries have been at loggerheads since Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and involvement in a conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region which Kyiv says has killed 14,000 people.
Ukraine’s government has played down the prospects of approving the Sputnik V vaccine quickly, if at all. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called the vaccine “a hybrid weapon of Russia against Ukraine” in an interview with The Day newspaper.