Romania to launch mobile COVID-19 vaccination centers this month

Romanian officials plan to launch the first mobile COVID-19 vaccination centers this month in an effort to boost rural access to the vaccine. Valeriu Gheorghita, the coordinator of the national vaccination campaign, said that vaccination in such centers could start on April 20.

“On April 20, we want to start vaccinations at mobile centers; about 20 mobile centers will be set up in a first stage, they will be distributed nationwide, and will be coordinated by the County Committee for Management and Coordination of Intervention in cooperation with military hospitals because all these 20 centers operate with human resources from the Ministry of Defense,” Gheoghita said in a press conference on Tuesday, April 6, according to News.ro.

These mobile centers will go to rural localities where the population doesn’t have access to vaccination centers or family doctors, and will mainly use the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Valeriu Gheorghita also explained.

According to Secretary of State for Health Andrei Baciu, Romania is set to receive more than 8.3 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in April and May, including the first batches of Johnson & Johnson vaccines, Digi24 reported. Currently, Romania uses the Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines.

“This week, we will receive 134,400 doses from Moderna and 110,564 doses from AstraZeneca. As for the vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech, we will receive 511,000 doses a week, from the information we have for the next two weeks. 512,000 doses will arrive in the last week of April, bringing the total to 2,046,330 doses at the end of April. For Moderna, nothing has changed from the week before, we are talking about a minimum of 280,800 doses for April, and for AstraZeneca, 879,990,” Baciu said.

Romania kicked off the vaccination campaign on December 27. By April 6, more than 2.15 million people received the vaccine: 897,857 got the first dose, and over 1.25 million received both doses.

According to Valeriu Gheorghita, 780,000 people who want to receive the COVID-19 vaccine have signed up on waiting lists by Tuesday, April 6. Most of them are from Bucharest and the counties of Cluj and Prahova.

“At the moment, we have about 780,000 people on the waiting lists. By category, about 60% are people belonging to the general population, included in the third stage of the vaccination campaign, about 32% are people belonging to the vulnerable category, people with chronic diseases, people over 65, people with disabilities, and about 7.5% are individuals working in key areas,” Gheorghita said, according to