Austria is providing short-term assistance to Georgia with a delivery of Corona vaccines. The Caucasus country is in dire straits due to delays in delivery by vaccine manufacturers. In some cases, the second vaccination dose for first-time vaccinated people could not be secured.
To help the people of Georgia in this difficult phase of its vaccination campaign, the Austrian Foreign Ministry delivered 5,000 vaccine doses of AstraZeneca to Tbilisi on Sunday evening.
A Georgian Airways plane with 5,000 vaccine doses on board took off from Vienna’s Schwechat airport on Sunday evening. After landing in Tbilisi, vaccination began immediately to ensure the urgently needed immunisation, especially in the fight against the new delta variant of the COVID-19 virus. In Georgia, less than eight percent have received the first vaccination, only 2.8 percent are fully immunised.
It was only a few days ago that I visited the Georgian capital Tbilisi and assured our Georgian friends that we will not abandon them in this difficult situation,
said Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg after departure of the aircraft.
I am all the more pleased that all the formalities could be clarified so quickly by the experts of my ministry and that the vaccines are now already on their way to Georgia, where they can be distributed immediately.
The delivery was made at the request of the Georgian government, which contacted the Austrian Foreign Ministry. The necessary formalities such as contractual and logistical delivery requirements were clarified within a few days in close cooperation with the Georgian Embassy in Vienna as well as the Austrian Embassy in Tbilisi.
The Foreign Ministry reacted immediately to the call for help from our neighbours in the South Caucasus, because, as Foreign Minister Schallenberg emphasised:
No one is safe until everyone is safe – so it is only natural that we help our friends and partners in our immediate neighbourhood with much needed vaccines.
