Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told Euronews that the Russian and Chinese coronavirus vaccines have proved to be “very much safe”.

„Some vaccines that were coming from the East were even safer than those that we got from the West. But all of them were great,“ Vucic said in an exclusive interview on Euronews Now.

Euronews recalled that Serbia is not a member of the European Union, and so far hasn’t received much help from the bloc in its vaccination effort but is well ahead of the EU. “Alongside the Pfizer-BioNtech jab, Serbia has been administering Russias’s Sputnik V vaccine, as well as China’s Sinopharm jab. Those last two shots haven’t yet been approved in the EU, but using them has allowed Serbia to post the highest rate of vaccination per capita in continental Europe. The government has made a point of saying that vaccines shouldn’t be a geopolitical matter, but a healthcare issue,” it said.

Vucic said that the goal is to fully vaccinate more than a million people by the end of February which is almost 15 percent o Serbia’s population of about seven million. He recalled that the country had not received any vaccine under the EU’s COVAX mechanism. „Many countries got their vaccines. And so far, we didn’t get a single one from the COVAX program. We got it from our bilateral arrangement with the Americans, with Pfizer. We got it from China, we got it from Russia. But we didn’t get it from the EU,“ he said, adding that he is not criticising anyone. “But we needed to take care of ourselves. It’s not easy watching the others in the surroundings taking all those vaccines, and you have nothing to offer to your people,” he said.

„I spoke several times to many people from the United Kingdom, China, Russia, all top officials. I was begging them, I was asking for more vaccines for Serbia – and not only for Serbia,“ he said.

He added that he hoped, in due time, to receive most of its vaccines from the EU. He said that for its part, Serbia stands ready to donate „a big chunk“ of its doses to North Macedonia and possibly to other Balkan countries in need, „because we need our neighbours to be vaccinated, to be inoculated in the way that we are,“ Euronews said.