Radovan Karadzic, Sarajevo is not your city, and you have no right to say that it is, just as you do not have the right to say in public, even if it’s in court, that someone has dug up bones around Bosnia and brought them to Srebrenica to make a fake graveyard. This is insulting.
Serbia Cancels Further Vaccine Imports
Belgrade | 27 January 2010 | Bojana Barlovac
Children in the town of Cacak, Serbia (photo by FoNet)
“Serbia paid for 857,500 doses. Out of that amount, 160,000 were administered to citizens,” the agency quoted Milosavljevic as saying. He added that the country needs to have 300,000 doses in its permanent reserves in case the epidemiological situation deteriorates.
Earlier in January, Serbia's government decided to stop further procurement of swine flu vaccines until further notice due to low interest among the public for vaccination.
Serbia has registered 690 swine flu cases so far and has experienced 79 fatalities from the virus. The Serbian government signed a contract to purchase three million doses of vaccines against the infection from Swiss manufacturer Novartis. Immediately after signing the contract, the government declared a swine flu epidemic on 11 November, meaning that a nationwide emergency vaccination process could then be carried out.
Vaccination in Serbia kicked off on December 17 with the health minister being the first to receive a jab in an effort to allay fears about the vaccine’s safety. The country's president, Boris Tadic, has also been innoculated. Twenty-three out of 144,043 people that have been vaccinated in the country have reported side effects, according to media.
According to the minister, the amount of the shots in the country at the moment is sufficient to continue the vaccination process.
On Tuesday, Novartis warned countries not to cancel their orders for the vaccine, stressing that priority in a future epidemic would be given to those states which honored their contract obligations.
