Béla Merkely, the rector of Budapest’s medical Semmelweis University, said having as many as five Covid-19 vaccines approved by Hungary’s drug authority is an advantage in the fight against the disease.
Merkely told public broadcaster Kossuth Rádió that public trust in the vaccine is continuously rising, adding that 99.9 percent of doctors and 87 percent of other health workers at Semmelweis University have already been inoculated.
Getting vaccinated against Covid-19 gives one a nearly hundred percent chance of avoiding a severe case of the disease, he said, adding that a vaccine recipient who did contract coronavirus would likely experience “nothing more than a cold”.
The important thing, he said, was to have as many vaccines on hand as possible and to administer them nationwide as quickly as possible so that “life in the country can get back to normal”. Countries that prolong their vaccination campaigns for up to a year will incur far greater losses than those that are able to vaccinate the majority of their populations within a matter of a few months, Merkely said.
When asked about China’s Sinopharm vaccine, the rector said the jab, similarly to the flu shot, was based on a tried and tested technology using a deactivated virus. “This is a method that’s been in use for over fifty years and there’s a lot of experience behind it,” he added.
Photo credit: koronavirus.gov.hu