WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland has bought over 60 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from six producers, the prime minister said on Tuesday, as the country gears up for a vaccination programme early next year.
Poland is aiming to vaccinate its entire adult population of around 30 million people, setting up some 8,000 vaccination points across the country in one of the largest logistical challenges its health service has ever faced.
“We are secured – and now is the time for a great challenge, which is the implementation of the National COVID-19 Vaccination Programme,” Mateusz Morawiecki wrote in a Facebook post.
The government announced further details of the programme on Tuesday. Morawiecki’s top aide, Michal Dworczyk, told a news conference that so far the government had enough applications from entities that wished to act as vaccination points to allow 180,000 people a week to be immunised.
However, the government may face problems convincing people to get vaccinated. A recent survey from CBOS showed almost half of Poles do not intend to do so.
As of Tuesday, Poland, a country of around 38 million people, had reported 1,076,180 cases of the coronavirus and 20,592 deaths.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish and Pawel Florkiewicz; editing by Catherine Evans, Larry King)
