In a world where most purchase contracts for coronavirus vaccines are either closely guarded secrets or at least their financial terms are rarely revealed, Hungary made the unprecedented move of making public the contracts it signed with the Chinese and Russian manufacturers the country is using, news portal Mandiner reports.
Contracts for the procurement of Chinese and Russian vaccines against the coronavirus were shared by cabinet minister Gergely Gulyás on Facebook Thursday afternoon. “The Hungarian government is on the side of openness on the issue of vaccine purchases,” Gulyás wrote, adding that Hungary will also ask the European Commission to publish similar contracts concluded by Brussels.
The cabinet minister announced at a press briefing on Thursday after the weekly cabinet meeting that the government would make public its contracts for the Russian and Chinese vaccines within a day.
The Facebook post includes all pages of both contracts, both in Hungarian and English.
Meanwhile, Chief Medical Officer Cecília Müller announced on Thursday that Hungary has received another 450,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, which are much-needed, as she added that the pandemic is present in 98 percent of Hungary’s settlements.
Müller said that the number of new cases is rising at an “extraordinary pace,” with 35,802 new cases registered in the ninth week of the year (March 1-7), and 8,312 new cases on this past Wednesday alone. She said that during the third wave of the pandemic which began in Hungary on February 18, the number of patients requiring hospital care has tripled and the number of those on ventilators has doubled.
