The most devastating of all this is the fact that the supply in Serbia is larger than demand: 2 million vaccinated people and nobody else wants to get one (original estimates were that there is around 6 million adults needing vaccination).
Serbia also has enough supply, because they buy the vaccine from everyone they can (chinese, russian, european,...).
In many (EU) countries, the EU is passively forcing them to use EU backed vacciness and not foreign ones (russian, chinese), while being unable to provide enough vaccines for their own people and even exporting those vaccines to other non-eu countries.
This is not accurate. Moderna is a foreign vaccine in the EU. The difference is that this vaccine has met all the safety and clinical study requirements. The Russian vaccine is enrolled in a rolling review by the EMA right now.
> has met all the safety and clinical study requirements
That's an interesting twist on the facts, since I think none of them have met those: that's why they are all getting Emergency Use licenses vs the regular licenses when they really meet "all the safety and clinical study requirements".
Certainly, the Sinopharm and Sputnik V have less data available publicly, but everything points that they are not unreasonably unsafe (after all, almost 0.5M people have been revaccinated with Sinopharm vaccine in Serbia), and they are using the tried-and-true methods of vaccine development in use for dozens of years. Basically, we are talking about simply different levels of "unknown" vs "totally safe"/"unsafe".
As far as efficacy, they all seem to provide at least a decent amount of protection against hard illness after getting infected with coronavirus, which is what I hope most people care about at this point of the pandemic.
In Serbia everyone is free to restrict what vaccine they want to get, and many went for the Chinese one because of it being readily available (I had it in my list too even though I've gotten AstraZeneca one because I was low-priority thus was one of the last to be vaccinated who signed up for it, and it was about the time AZ was getting all the negative press so nobody would take it).
> That's an interesting twist on the facts, since I think none of them have met those: that's why they are all getting Emergency Use licenses vs the regular licenses when they really meet "all the safety and clinical study requirements".
This is splitting hairs really, they sped up the process yes. All vaccines did, but safety and clinical study requirements still have to be met.
Hopefully that does not repeat elsewhere.