He added that deliveries should begin next month.
“We expect to receive nearly 16 million doses of this vaccine; that's the amount we have ordered, and shipments should begin arriving in April," he told reporters on Wednesday.
He added that the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the EU’s drug regulator, had also opened a fast-track “rolling review” procedure for a COVID-19 vaccine being developed by American producer Novavax.
Photo: Hakan Nural/Anadolu Agency/PAP/ABACAPRESS.COM
Officials in Warsaw have announced that domestic biotechnology firm Mabion has struck a deal with the US manufacturer to produce the vaccine in Poland.
The Novavax vaccine has "a realistic prospect of being approved in the second quarter of this year," Niedzielski said.
The European Union, of which Poland is part, has struck deals to secure vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Moderna, CureVac, Sanofi-GSK, and Johnson & Johnson.
The European Medicines Agency is on March 11 expected to issue an opinion on whether to approve Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine under a speedy review.
Johnson & Johnson has said it is ready to start distributing the vaccine across the EU in the second quarter of 2021.
The EU drug regulator said on February 12 it had launched a real-time review of CureVac's COVID-19 vaccine to speed up potential approvals.
The regulator said its human medicines committee would review data from ongoing trials of the German biopharmaceutical firm's vaccine until there is enough clinical data for approval.
Photo: PAP/DPA/Frank Hoermann/SVEN SIMON
Meanwhile, Polish President Andrzej Duda has talked to China’s leader Xi Jinping about a possible purchase of a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine, an aide said on Monday.
(gs/pk)
Source: PAP