The Polish government is hoping to vaccinate enough of the country's population against COVID-19 to overcome the pandemic by the second quarter of 2021, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Sunday.
"Vaccination provides a great opportunity to free ourselves from the pandemic. The success of the vaccination program depends on how many people are vaccinated. The more people who get vaccinated, the sooner we will bid coronavirus farewell. Perhaps in the second quarter [of next year], it will be possible to have a sufficient proportion of the population vaccinated in order to make the coronavirus less of a problem," Morawiecki said at a press briefing.
Poland launched its mass COVID-19 vaccination program earlier on Sunday, along with the rest of the European Union's 27 member states. The first shipment, comprising of 10,000 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine against the disease, arrived in the country on Saturday.
The government expects to receive approximately 300,000 doses of the vaccine by the end of December, enough to vaccinate 150,000 people.
In Poland, pensioners, at-risk individuals, and first responders are set to be vaccinated first, followed by the general public from January 15. Morawiecki said earlier in December that the Polish government has secured a total of 60 million vaccine doses from six producers.
Since the start of the pandemic, more than 1.25 million positive tests for COVID-19 have been registered in Poland, and 27,118 people have died due to coronavirus-related complications. The country's health ministry registered 3,678 new cases of the disease on Sunday. (/Sputnik)
( With inputs from ANI )
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