At least one million European Union citizens, the majority of the Hungarians, will be unable to travel to the United States, even after November 8, when the latter is set to remove the Entry ban on 33 world countries, including here the 26 Schengen Area countries, Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Revealing further details on the removal of the entry ban for vaccinated travellers, the White House said that eligible to enter the US after the first week of November will be those who have been vaccinated with one of the vaccines approved by the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
So far, none of the two has approved the Russian-based COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.
Data by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) shows that two EU members Hungary and Slovakia, have administered the Sputnik V vaccine.
So far, Hungary has administered 1,806,156 Sputnik V doses out of two million purchased, and Slovakia has administered 37,677 out of 200,000 doses purchased. Given that Sputnik V is a two-dose vaccine, this means that approximately 903,078 Hungarians and 18,838 Slovaks have been vaccinated with Sputnik V.
No other EU or Schengen Area country has administered the Sputnik vaccine in its territory.
However, SchengenVisaInfo.com reported back in August that at least 15 thousand Italians who cross the border between Italy and San Marino daily for work have been vaccinated with Sputnik V in San Marino.
The European microstate has also vaccinated over 70 per cent of its adult population with the Russian vaccine against COVID-19, which is also the only vaccine administered in this country, home to about 33 thousand citizens.
At the beginning of September, the Ministry of Health of San Marino had claimed that the vaccine had turned out to be highly efficient against the virus.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) hasn’t approved the vaccine yet, either, though it started reviewing the same on March 4, 2021. Moreover, it has recently been reported that the agency has postponed the approval of the vaccine to the first quarter of 2022. The decision was taken after the manufacturer hadn’t allegedly provided the required data for the review planned to happen by the end of November.
The agency has also asked the Russian manufacturer to complete the application dossier on Sputnik V’s production, by including information as active ingredients and the bottling of the final product.
According to VisaGuide.World, so far, approximately 73 countries have officially recognised the Sputnik V vaccine, including Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, San Marino, Northern Macedonia, Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Bahrain, Belarus, Bangladesh, Hungary and India.
