Serbia signed a new contract with the Pfizer pharmaceutical company on Friday for an additional 1.2 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to be delivered in April, Health Minister Zlatibor Loncar said.

After talks in Belgrade with his counterpart from the Republika Srpska (RS) entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alen Seranic, Loncar told reporters that the contract foresees the delivery of an addition 1.19 million does of the Pfizer vaccine in the third quarter of the year.

Health workers in RS have been coming to Serbia to be inoculated and almost 5,000 doses have already been administered.

“We are implementing the agreement between (Serbian) President Aleksandar Vucic and leadership of Republika Srpska and are close to 5,000 but we won't stop there. I agreed on further cooperation with the RS health minister,” said Loncar.

Currently, Serbia is using the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, Russia's Sputnik V, and the Chinese Sinopharm. It previously announced that it had ordered AstraZeneca's vaccine, however not one dose has arrived yet.

The Belgrade Vecernje Novosti daily reported today that a contingent of 150,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to arrive on 21 February.

According to health authorities, Serbia has inoculated 1,018,937 people and more than 635,000 have received the first dose, which ranks Serbia sixth in the world in terms of vaccination, second in Europe and first in the region.

At the same time, the number of new coronavirus cases is increasing and on Thursday 2,561 were registered. The country's COVID response team has said that it could ramp up restrictions if the situation continues to deteriorate.

According to data on Thursday, there were 3,472 patients in hospital treatment and 148 were on ventilators, whereas on Friday there were 3,499 hospitalised patients and 152 in intensive care.

Since the outbreak of the epidemic in that country, there have been 431,680 registered cases of COVID-19 and 4,306 people who have died as a consequence. Serbia has tested 2,824,207 samples for the new virus.