STA, 25 May 2021 - Slovenia's vaccination centres are receiving fewer anti-Covid vaccines this week than they have ordered because there are not enough at the moment, the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ) has told the STA. This is because supplies by producers other than Pfizer are still rather unreliable.
Slovenia is not ordering vaccines directly from individual producers, but through a joint EU public procurement mechanism.
Once the vaccines are in the country, NIJZ distributes them equally among all vaccination centres based on vaccination priority groups.
This week, vaccination centres will receive all the ordered vaccines for second jabs.
They will moreover receive 70% of the ordered mRNA vaccines, that is by Pfizer or Moderna, which are intended for first jabs of six priority groups. Johnson & Johnson's vaccine supplies are even scarcer, so the centres will receive only 20% of what they have ordered.
NIJZ provided the explanation to the STA yesterday after local community health centres in Ljubljana, Maribor and Koper said they had received much fewer vaccines than ordered for this week.
The Ljubljana vaccination centre received only a third of the amount it had ordered, while the Maribor vaccination centre received around 50%.
Simona Repar Bornšek from the Ljubljana Community Health Centre said they had ordered some 12,000 jabs for this week, but received only 35%, so they will vaccinate only those waiting for their second jab.
"We are some 8,000 shots short, for around three vaccination days," she explained on Tuesday, adding that "things are changing on a weekly basis, so I don't know if we should at all invite people to vaccination if we don't have the vaccines".
