KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine’s parliament named a new health minister on Thursday, who promised to speed up vaccinations against COVID-19, including by trying to make vaccines domestically.
Viktor Lyashko, previously a deputy health minister, was promoted to replace Maksym Stepanov, who was fired this week after Prime Minister Denys Shmygal accused him of failing to supply vaccines quickly enough.
“Overcoming coronavirus disease is my number one priority. We will do everything so that Ukrainians can be vaccinated, work and travel,” Lyashko told the parliament. Setting up domestic manufacturing of vaccines would be a priority, he said.
Ukraine is among the European countries most affected by the pandemic and has lagged in its vaccination efforts, with only 964,745 Ukrainians having received their first vaccine dose as of May 20, out of a population of around 41 million.
Shmygal said this week only 2.3 million doses of vaccine had been delivered to Ukraine so far. Ukraine has registered around 2.2 million infections and 48,899 deaths since the start of the pandemic last year.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Natalia Zinets; Editing by Alison Williams and Peter Graff)
