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| - Hungary expects to soon sign a deal for a Chinese coronavirus vaccine in a further break with the European Union, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Friday, adding he would choose it for his own inoculation. "The Chinese have known this virus for the longest time, hence probably they know most about it, so I will wait for my turn, and when I choose I will want the Chinese vaccine," Orban said. "Today or tomorrow we will sign a contract about supply from (China)." Budapest expects to order 500,000 doses of the Chinese-made Sinopharm Covid-19 jab for delivery in February, Orban's chief-of-staff said Thursday. Last week Hungary became the first EU member to approve Russia's Sputnik V vaccine, and said it had agreed to buy two million doses of the jab. To speed up the approval process, a government decree published Thursday allows the foreign minister to license any vaccine that has already been administered to more than one million people, without the Hungarian pharmaceutical authority signing off. Orban said Hungary was monitoring how mass inoculation with a Chinese vaccine is proceeding in neighbouring Serbia, home to a sizeable community of ethnic Hungarians. Earlier this month, Serbia became the first European country to start a mass vaccination programme with one million doses delivered by Sinopharm. Orban has long courted both Moscow and Beijing as part of what he calls a "pragmatic" foreign policy, and regularly is at loggerheads with Brussels, particularly over migration policy. Criticising the slow pace of delivery of vaccines from the EU's joint procurement programme, Orban said that his government is also looking at procuring doses from Russia, China, the US, and Israel. Hungarians' willingness to get inoculated is one of the lowest rates in the EU but has been rising in recent months. In a survey published by opinion research firm Publicus on Friday, six out of ten Hungarians said they would want to get vaccinated, up from four out of ten in November. The most popular choices were the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, with the Russian and Chinese jabs least popular. pmu/deh/mjs
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