500,000 doses arrive in Kyiv from India
Courtesy of Oleksandr Skichko
Doctors at Cherkasy Regional Hospital prepare to administer the first COVID-19 vaccination in Ukraine.
KYIV – Yevhen Horenko, an intensive care doctor who works in a COVID-19 ward in the Cherkasy Regional Hospital, became the first person in Ukraine to receive a vaccine against the coronavirus on February 24. The previous day, Ukraine received 500,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from India, a day after it was officially registered for use in the country on February 22.
Just before getting his vaccine, Mr. Horenko had his temperature taken and was given instruction by the person who administered the vaccination. He said that he felt fine, but was a little nervous about the historic moment.
“Vaccination is a marker of a civilized society,” Mr. Horenko said. “It is better to be warned [about the side effects] than to be treated for complications of the disease.”
After the injection, Mr. Horenko was monitored by a doctor for 30 minutes in order to ensure that he did not experience any severe side effects from the vaccination. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved by the World Health Organization, and it has been approved for use in the United Kingdom, the European Union and India.
The first vaccines were sent to the Cherkasy region, which got 16,200 vials of the vaccine – enough to vaccinate 8,100 people.
Like most other COVID-19 vaccines, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccination is given in two doses. Recent research published in the international medical journal The Lancet indicates that this particular vaccine is most effective when the interval between the first and second vaccination is three months or more.
Ukraine’s Minister of Health, Maksym Stepanov, said the vaccine was safe and urged Ukrainians to get vaccinated.
“We have received a reliable vaccine from a world-renown manufacturer, the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, which meets safety and quality standards and is widely used by leading countries in both Europe and the world,” Mr. Stepanov said.
In India, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is produced at the local Serum Institute of India under the name Covishield. The institution is the largest producer of vaccines in the world. It is reported to produce more than 50 million doses per month. Covishield is made from a weakened version of chimpanzee adenovirus. In general, the drug has a broad spectrum of action. When a vaccine is given to a patient, it stimulates the immune system to produce antibodies to attack any coronavirus infection.
One of the advantages of the vaccine is that it can be safely stored at temperatures of 2-8 degrees Celsius. As a result, the vaccine can be administered in doctors’ offices. This makes the vaccine’s use and distribution more affordable than others, such as the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which needs to be stored at -70 degrees Celsius.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stressed that the logistics of distributing the vaccine throughout the country have been worked out and there should be no reason for delays in the process. The drug will be delivered to hospitals by mobile teams. The vaccines will first be offered to doctors in medical institutions that provide care for COVID-19 patients. They will then be offered to other hospital personnel, including emergency medical care workers and family doctors.
“Vaccination must be voluntary,” Mr. Zelenskyy said. “No one needs to be forced [to take the vaccine]. It is better to inform people in detail about the decent quality of the drug.”
Ukraine’s Chief Public Health Officer Viktor Lyashko said that many medical professionals have already recovered from COVID-19, possibly gaining immunity for the coming months.
Mr. Lyashko said that the second stage of vaccinations in Ukraine will be administered to the military. Mr. Zelenskyy said he would take the vaccine together with members of the military.
Ukraine expects to receive additional vaccines in the coming months under the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program. The government said it plans to get more than 100,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, nearly two million doses from the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech, 15 million Novavax doses, and four million in total of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
“The vaccination program in Ukraine is being implemented on schedule and according to the Ministry of Health’s roadmap,” Mr. Stepanov, the health minister, said. “We did our utmost to ensure that our doctors, and all Ukrainians, receive safe, effective, and high-quality vaccines from world-renowned manufacturers.”
On January 29, the Cabinet of Ministers published a vaccination schedule in which it said that Ukraine plans to vaccinate 14.4 million people in the country this year. Frontline medical workers treating COVID-19 patients will be the first recipients of 367,000 vaccines in the initial phase of the plan. The next stage includes ambulance personnel, laboratory staff testing for COVID-19, residents and staff of nursing homes and the military at the frontline of the conflict in the east of the country.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Health been criticized because the European country of some 42 million people is one of the last in Europe to start administering vaccines.
“Vaccination in Ukraine was to begin on February 15. It’s too late. By this time, neighboring Poland had already vaccinated 2 million people, and Britain has vaccinated more than 15 million people. If vaccination starts two weeks later, it is thousands of infected and hundreds of dead,” Inna Sovsun, a member of parliament, said on February 19.
“All of the Ministry of Health activities during a pandemic are a complete mistake,” Ms. Sovsun said. “The whole world is fighting the coronavirus and deploying testing. Minister Stepanov promised 100,000 PCR [polymerase chain reaction] tests in December. But we’ve done less than 30,000 tests. And there was no contact tracing system,” said Ms. Sovsun, who is also the deputy chairman of the Holos Party.
According to the Public Health Center of Ukraine, 87,000 people in Ukraine have been tested for COVID-19 as of February 24. Since the beginning of the pandemic in Ukraine, 1.325 million people have contracted the virus. Of that number, 1.16 million people have recovered, while roughly 25,000 people have died in Ukraine as a result of coronavirus.