Germany has purchased 5 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine from Romania to speed up its booster campaign, according to media reports quoting the German Health Ministry.

The jabs will be available in Germany from January 24, local Agerpres reported, quoting dpa.

Romania received the vaccine doses through the European Union's vaccine procurement scheme but failed to use them, as its own COVID-19 vaccination campaign has been going quite slow. With a cumulative uptake of at least one vaccine dose of about 41%, Romania ranks low in the EU in terms of vaccination rates.

According to the January 11 official report, 25,905 people were vaccinated in Romania in 24 hours, and only 6,854 of them received their first dose. In total, slightly over 8 million people received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose by Tuesday, January 11. Most of them, namely 7.89 million, are fully vaccinated, and about 2.16 million also received their booster shots.

Meanwhile, Romania's daily COVID-19 case count started rising rapidly over the past few days as the country entered the fifth wave of the pandemic. On January 3, for example, health officials reported 1,756 new cases of infection in 24 hours. The number increased quite fast in the coming days, reaching 6,018 on January 6 and 8,861 on January 11.

Local healthcare group MedLife said recently that Romania's daily tally of new COVID-19 cases could hit 50,000 in two weeks as the highly transmissible Omicron variant is spreading in the country.

irina.marica@romania-insider.com

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