Hungary a vaccination leader

It acquired shots from China, Russia; cases are on rise again

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Hungary has emerged as a European Union leader in COVID-19 vaccinations, the result of a strategy that sought shots from Russia and China as well as from inside the bloc, spurring increasing trust in jabs from eastern nations.

But that strategy is up against a rise in new COVID-19 cases and deaths blamed on a more infectious virus variant first found in Britain that is putting an unprecedented strain on Hungary’s health care system. A new round of lockdown measures took effect Monday to curb the surge, which saw deaths averaging around 150 per day and hospitalizations and new cases breaking records.

As of Friday, 11.9 percent of Hungary’s adult population had received at least one dose. That is the second-highest rate of vaccination in the 27-member EU after the small nation of Malta and substantially above the EU average of 7 percent. With five vaccines approved for use in Hungary, more than in any other EU nation, more than 1.2 million Hungarians have received a jab in the country of fewer than 10 million, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The vaccination campaign is only growing in importance; Hungary has the seventh-worst death rate per 1 million inhabitants in the world, at 16,627, according to Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Karoly Dery, a general practitioner in Hatvan, 35 miles east of Budapest, said the rapid spread of the virus has led to increased acceptance of all vaccines.

“I always tell anti-vaccination people that any vaccine is better than a month on a ventilator and possible death,” Dery said. “There’s nothing uglier or more awful than death by suffocation.”

Right-wing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban broke with the

EU’s common procurement program to purchase millions of doses from Russia and China that were not approved by the EU’s medicines regulator.

In February, the country became the first in the EU to begin using China’s Sinopharm and Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines, even as polling showed that public trust in non-EU approved vaccines was low. A January survey of 1,000 people in the capital of Budapest by pollster Median and the 21 Research Center showed that among those willing to be vaccinated, only 27 percent would take a Chinese vaccine and 43 percent a Russian vaccine, compared with 84 percent who would take a jab developed in Western countries.

Dr. Bela Merkely, the rector of Semmelweis Medical University in Budapest, told the AP that Hungary’s exceptional performance in vaccinations can be attributed to its purchase of the Russian and Chinese vaccines.