Detailing the government’s plans to fight an epidemic that has killed over 32,000 Poles, Michał Dworczyk told reporters that people over 80 would be able to start registering on Friday to book a time and place for shots.
Registration of people over 70 will start on January 22.
Dworczyk said citizens in the over-80 and over-70 groups would start receiving shots on January 25.
Outlining how the country’s national inoculation programme will unfold, he added that by the end of March, Poland expected to receive over 6 million vaccines from two producers: Pfizer and Moderna.
The European Union, of which Poland is part, has struck deals to secure vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, CureVac, Sanofi-GSK, and Johnson & Johnson.
Dworczyk said his country would be administering 1 million shots a month on average. "We have the operational capacity to vaccinate 3.6 million people a month. This situation is determined by an agreement with the EU," he added.
The first batch of 10,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses arrived in Poland on December 26. The next day a Warsaw hospital nurse became the first Pole to receive a shot.
Frontline healthcare workers are the first group to be inoculated, and will be followed by pensioners in nursing homes, OAPs, police, soldiers and teachers.
Poland on Wednesday reported 9,053 new coronavirus infections and 481 more deaths, bringing its total number of cases to 1,404,905 and fatalities to 32,074.
(pk)
Source: PAP