Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg travelled to the Ukrainian capital Kiev on Sundayto take part in the inaugural summit of the Crimea Platform and for talks with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal.
With him, Schallenberg brought another Austrian vaccine donation, which he presented to Ukrainian Health Minister and Chief Medical Doctor Ihor Kuzin upon his arrival. Ukraine is receiving a total of 500,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine; 250,000 of these doses will arrive in Kiev by Monday, with the remainder following over the course of autumn.
Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg:
In Austria, we have not put the pandemic behind us just yet. We will never reach that point if not even our immediate neighbours in Europe are vaccinated. An additional donation of urgently needed vaccines allows Austria to show solidarity with Ukraine – because blank spaces on the world’s vaccine map are blind spots in our protective shield against the coronavirus. We must fight this together.
In particular, since mid-July there has been another rise in confirmed daily new infections as well as hospitalisations in Ukraine, particularly due to the spread of the Delta variant. At the same time, only 11.7% of Ukrainians have received at least one vaccine dose, and only 6.9% of the population is fully immunised (in Austria, by comparison, those figures are about 61% and 57%).
Minister of Health Wolfgang Mückstein:
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon that can only be fought at a global level. Therefore, it is not enough to continue increasing the vaccination coverage in Austria. Rather, countries like Austria, which are fortunate enough to have more vaccines than they currently need, must do their part to ensure that sufficient vaccine protection is available everywhere in the world. With this donation to Ukraine, we are once again showing our solidarity.
This is already the fifth vaccine donation from Austria. In total, 655,000 vaccine doses have been donated to Lebanon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Tunisia, and Georgia in recent weeks. The donation to Ukraine will not be the last – additional aid transports are in progress.
