The first shipment of AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine is expected to arrive in Croatia on Saturday, with vaccinations starting next week, Croatia's coronavirus czar, Krunoslav Capak, said on Friday.

Some 154,000 doses of that vaccine should be made available throughout February, Capak said in a news conference.

“It is important to say, given the controversy, that the European Medicines Agency has registered the vaccine (…) for all age groups over 18. In clinical studies, the vaccine is 60 percent effective in preventing disease,” Capak told reporters.

He stressed that there were no reported cases of anyone receiving the vaccine later suffering from a ‘severe form of the disease’, which means that the vaccine is nearly 100 percent effective against severe cases of Covid-19. The vaccine’s efficiency in elderly patients is about the same as for younger age groups, Capak added.

He said that that although some European countries had recommended that the vaccine shouldn’t  be administered to persons over the age of 65, Croatian health authorities believe that there is no reason for such limitations. Health authorities will also recommend administering the second dose of the vaccine 8-12 weeks after the first one, because ‘effectiveness is somewhat higher when there is a larger interval between the two doses.’

According to latest data, 59,593 Croatians had been vaccinated by yesterday, and 35,912 of them had received the second vaccine dose.

Capak said that new cases dropped by 13.1 percent this week compared to the one before. The average incidence in Croatia now stands at 164.7 per 100,000 people, with Sisak-Moslavina County registering the highest incidence, of 265.2, and Istria County recording the lowest, 46.9.

When comparing our incidence with that of other countries, Croatia ranks 6th in the EU, with only Hungary, Denmark, Bulgaria, Greece, and Finland reporting lower incidence rates, while Portugal has the highest. As for the percentage of positive tests, Croatia ranks 18th in the EU with 8.7 percent.

Capak also said that Croatia’s medicines agency Halmed had so far received 596 reports of suspected side effects of the vaccine – 579 for Pfizer’s and 17 for the Moderna vaccine. There were also 26 cases of allergic reactions to the vaccine, and all other side effects noticed were mild, he said.