UPDATE: Hungary’s drug regulator will help Slovakia examine batches
of Russian Sputnik V vaccines that Slovakia had received, Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó announced on Friday afternoon after meeting the Slovak Finance Minister Igor Matovič in Budapest.
The Russians have terminated the contract for supplying Slovakia with the Sputnik V vaccine and are demanding that the 200,000 vaccine doses that were delivered to the country in early March should be returned, Finance Minister Igor Matovič (OLaNO) reported on Friday following his trip to Moscow on the previous day. Matovic explained that the Russian side feels extraordinarily wronged because the Slovak State Institute for Drug Control (SUKL) had the vaccine examined by a laboratory that is not part of the official EU laboratory network, and whose recent statement regarding the vaccine has damaged its reputation all around the world. Matovič claimed that despite this, he managed to ensure that Slovakia will still have „open doors" to Sputnik V. At the same time, the minister confirmed that he is set to embark on a trip to Hungary, where he'll hold talks on the Russian-produced vaccine. Then he left without answering journalists' questions.
The Slovak State Institute for Drug Control (ŠÚKL) said on
Thursday that it was not told by anyone in authority that the testing of the
Russian Sputnik V vaccine by the Slovak Academy of Sciences' Biomedical Centre
would constitute a violation of the contract with the Russian producer. The testing in that particular lab was done following a written request of the former Health Minister Marek Krajči.
