The Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis took part in the teleconference of European Council, which focused on the strategy of European Union to address the pandemic.
According to government sources, the Prime Minister, together with the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and the Prime Minister of Denmark Merte Frederiksen, the need to accelerate the licensing of vaccine candidates that are in the final stage of evaluation by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) -first example is the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford in cooperation with the AstraZeneca.
They add that Kyriakos Mitsotakis noted that Europe must henceforth ensure that it leads developments on the licensing front, especially with regard to the approval of vaccines that are single dose or do not require deep-freezing conditions and can therefore change the data in national vaccination campaigns.
He also clarified that the three leaders' initiative is not aimed at putting political pressure on the EMA, but at bypassing time-consuming bureaucratic procedures that delay decisions based on tangible scientific evidence.
The same sources point out that in his interventions, Kyriakos Mitsotakis also stressed the need to fully respect the vaccine delivery schedules agreed with pharmaceutical companies for the first quarter of 2021, stressing that in the fight against Covid-19 there is no room to waste time.
At the same time, the Prime Minister presented to the other leaders his proposal for the institutionalisation of a European vaccination certificate, clarifying that the first step is to reach agreement on the technical characteristics and standardisation of its form.
This is in order to do the groundwork so that Europe will be ready to discuss its use when the percentage of European citizens who have been vaccinated has increased significantly.
In addition, as regards the appearance of mutant strains of coronavirus, the Prime Minister stressed the importance of the exchange of best practices between the EU Member States in order to deal with them effectively.
