During yesterday’s speech at the joint conference in Brussels with Borrell and Várhelyi, Prime Minister Rama said that his government was looking beyond the “desirable sources of vaccine,” a declaration that pushed many media to doubt whether Albania was already in contact with China or Russia for their vaccines. According to the Voice of America, through yesterday’s speech Rama made it obvious that Albania was seeking other types of vaccines. Today, during a meeting with journalists, asked whether his government had started direct discussions to get Russian or Chinese vaccines, Rama responded by saying that he wasn’t going to comment upon this issue, a response which according to VOA was not a denial.
In the last weeks, Rama has repeatedly said that his government was aiming to follow the European Union in every step of the vaccination process, including the approval of the vaccines. Since until now the Russian or Chinese vaccines are not approved from the EU (the Russian vaccine though has already been distributed to some EU countries such as Hungary or Slovakia), Albania has also followed the same path. Nevertheless, in the 22nd of February, Rama acknowledged the success of the Chinese and Russian vaccine. “The Chinese vaccine is clearly successful, just look at Turkey, or the United Arab Emirates […] In the same page the words that are being said for the Russian vaccine are all positive ones” said Rama, adding that “In all the cases I want to make it clear that it’s not that we have the opportunity to get those vaccines and we are refusing them. We have not and we will not make further steps towards those two sources because we are aware that there are no objective reasons to expect for results.”
Meanwhile, in mid-February, Prime Minister Rama talked about the possibility of getting the Chinese vaccine, not excluding that as an option. “For sure in the aspect of our partnership we could do that step, perhaps we will need to do that in a second moment, I am not excluding that, but I would prefer to not do that, because it would be a blow for the European Union,” said Rama. The criticism against the EU for not providing vaccines to the Western Balkans has been a returning theme in the last weeks for Rama, and he repeated it also during yesterday’s meeting.
The month of February was the deadliest in terms of deaths from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic crisis. So far, Albania has vaccinated only 15,027 people. Considering that the government is trying to avoid the lockdown due to financial reasons, the vaccines are the only solution to return back to normality. With the actual rhythm of vaccination, it looks like Albania has decided to knock down to non-Western doors to get some help.
