Prime Minister Edi Rama visited the town of Kukes, where he started the day by welcoming Kosovo health workers, who started getting the COVID-19 vaccine shots in Albania. Commenting on the vaccine rollout for Kosovo doctors and nurses, as well as on the immunisation programme in the country, the Premier said:
“We started with the welcome to our brothers and sisters from Kosovo, namely a group of doctors and nurses from Kosovo, who are receiving the COVID-19 vaccine here in Kukes. We finally succeeded in reaching this goal following a series of delays of bureaucratic nature, yet, on the other side, this is what matters least.
What matters most is that Kosovo health workers have started to get vaccinated and Albania has played its role, has fulfilled its duty to the other side of Alps, at a time when we all know that Europe has left this neighbourhood out of its vaccine delivery scheme since the very beginning.
We have succeeded to break this siege, because it was really a siege of impossibility, by signing a direct contract with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. In the meantime, we now have Pfizer and the AstraZeneca vaccines available and it has allowed us to kick off the mass immunisation of teachers and the academic staff.
Around 42.000 people have received the COVID-19 vaccine as of today.
We will speed up the immunisation process. We will soon secure a considerable quantity of vaccines that will allow us to accelerate the vaccination pace, as we still have to catch the desired and needed pace in order to deliver on our ambition that the next tourist season is relieved from the heavy burden of this invisible enemy that we have already started to gradually repel in this final stage of our fight.
A dim light has started to emerge in the end of the long tunnel we entered together with whole world a year ago. We are determined to get out of this tunnel as soon as possible and we will definitely do at the same time with many EU member states, even though we were left out of the vaccine delivery scheme since the very beginning.
I am happy that this start of the vaccine rollout also for Kosovo doctors and nurses serendipitously coincided – yet Hegel used to say “coincidence is the sword through which necessity clears its path” – with the publication of a useless map a day ago by the President of Serbia, who finds himself in a sorry plight by resorting time after time to this sort of provocations, which actually show a huge impasse Serbia faces, and it is not our impasse and the future of Albanians lies in our own hands. I am truly confident that despite disputes we will be able to build our future with our own hands, though hindering our own selves time after time.
