Ljubljana - After the European Commission decided not to order new Covid-19 vaccines from AstraZeneca beyond June, a Slovenian vaccination official has assured those who have already received the first dose that they will also receive the second one.

Asked about the issue at the daily Covid-19 press briefing, Bojana Beović, the head of the national advisory committee on immunisation, said there were currently 133,000 people in the country who had received the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine and were waiting to get another.

She said there were 49,000 doses of the vaccine still available with an additional 490,000 expected to be delivered in May and June, so there should be no problem with the second dose.

Some vaccination centres are administering the AstraZeneca vaccine as the first jab these days. Asked whether it would make sense they stopped administering the first dose, Beović said it was an organisational issue. "If it's true there will be no more additional AstraZeneca doses, it would make sense stopping that vaccination."

As a last resort, should the country run out of the AstraZeneca vaccine for second doses, it could be replaced with a dose of an mRNK vaccine, those of Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna, said Beović, noting that apart from AstraZeneca there was currently no other two-dose vector vaccine registered in the EU.