From the very beginning of the current pandemic, EU central authorities have looked at vaccines not from a medical, but from an ideological point of view.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó stated this in an interview with Izvestia, answering the question of how he assesses the fact that the European Medicines Agency has not yet approved Sputnik V.
“I think the big mistake of the European Commission from the very beginning was that it looked at vaccines from an ideological and geopolitical point of view. In pre-pandemic times, if a doctor wrote me a prescription, I would go to the pharmacy to get the medicine and not look at who manufactured the drug or what country it came from. It’s a new phenomenon to ask who created the vaccine,” the minister said.
In his opinion, the vaccine is a way to save lives.
“That is why our experts made visits to Russia and China, where they looked at the production of their drugs, studied thousands of pages of documentation for these vaccines so that they received approval in Hungary. Our experts concluded that Sputnik V is safe and effective. Hence the question: why not provide your citizens with a safe and effective drug?” the publication’s interlocutor noted.
“Brussels still puts geopolitical and ideological meaning into vaccination. For example, WHO approved the Chinese drug Sinopharm. However, some European countries did not show any enthusiasm for this; on the contrary, they criticized the organization. From my point of view, this is quite hypocritical,” Szijjártó concluded.