Venko Filipce

An investigation has been launched after a tourist bus with North Macedonia licence plates caught fire and crashed on the Struma highway near the village of Bosnek on Tuesday morning at around 3am, killing at least 45 people, including some children, Bulgarian authorities said.

Opposition parties, government critics and some medical doctors have called for the resignation of North Macedonia's Health Minister, Venko Filipce, over the fire that took 14 lives in Tetovo's COVID-19 modular hospital earlier this week.

Ten people died in a fire on Sept. 8 evening at a hospital treating coronavirus patients in North Macedonia, authorities said.

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The fire broke out following an explosion in a Covid-19 clinic in Tetovo in the northwest of the Balkan country, said Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who immediately headed to the town.

Serbian citizens will be exempted from paying road tolls in North Macedonia during the summer holiday season from 15 June to 15 August as a sign of gratitude for the vaccines Serbia has procured, North Macedonian Health Minister Venko Filipče announced on Tuesday.

The head of the Anti-Corruption Commission in North Macedonia, Biljana Ivanovska, on Friday said that before launching an official inquiry into the country's COVID vaccine troubles, they had "started collecting information on the affair" in which Health Minister Venko Filipce is accused of trying to procure Chinese vaccines through a questionable intermediary firm.

North Macedonia on Sunday received the first batch of 3,000 doses of Russian vaccine Sputnik V from a total order of 200,000 in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

North Macedonia began administering vaccinations against the coronavirus Wednesday from a first batch of 4,680 doses of Pfizer vaccines donated by neighboring Serbia over the weekend.

A doctor and head nurse in the main COVID-19 center at the infectious diseases clinic in the capital, Skopje, were the first to receive the shots.

Meanwhile, Britain, the first country from the Western hemisphere to start immunisation, has already vaccinated 4.5 million people, according to One World In Data.

Germany and Italy have vaccinated 1.1 million people each, while North Macedonia's EU neighbours, Greece and Bulgaria, have vaccinated 85,000 and 18,000 people respectively.

The Bulgarian government adopted a decision to explore the possibilities for providing COVID-19 vaccines for Western Balkan countries and the Eastern Partnership members.

This will happen after the Bulgarian needs are met, in compliance with the relevant countries' legislation and the terms of the preliminary agreements concluded between the EC and the manufacturers of medicines.

North Macedonia has registered a new record number of daily coronavirus infections for the third consecutive day, with more than half the country's 2.1 million people under an 80-hour near-total lockdown.