The Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa sees the start of the vaccination as the last third of the fight against the corona pandemic. If the relevant announcements regarding the vaccine deliveries are correct, one will “be able to relax the measures towards the end of February, such as border traffic within the EU,” said Jansa on Sunday in front of a retirement home with 600 residents in Maribor, which was completely vaccinated during the day should be.
Half of the home residents have already had a corona infection, 270 should be vaccinated on Sunday, it said. The 30 employees should then follow on Monday. In other old people's homes in the country, including in the capital Ljubljana, vaccination campaigns have also got underway. Like other EU countries, Slovenia, a country of two million, received its first delivery of almost 10,000 vaccine doses yesterday.
Slovenia was hit particularly hard by the pandemic in the second wave and, with more than 2,500 corona deaths relative to the population, has twice as many victims as Austria. The conservative government is therefore speeding up the vaccinations. The vaccination of the general population at the age of 80 should start as early as the end of January, said Health Secretary Marija Magajne on Sunday in an old people's home in Ljubljana.
The head of the state institute for public health, Milan Krek, named vaccination of 60 percent of the total resident population by summer as a goal. The authorities have already set up an electronic registration system that registered 87,000 applications by Sunday morning. This corresponds to 4.4 percent of the Slovenian population. The registrants will be contacted as soon as the vaccine is available for their population group.
Among the first to be vaccinated was the emeritus Bishop of Marburg, Franc Kramberger, who lives in an old people's home. The 84-year-old wanted to set a good example, the authorities said. Jansa, 62, said he would get vaccinated “immediately” when it was his population's turn. After all, vaccination is currently still a “great privilege” that cannot be bought.
Jansa also looked at the countries outside the European Union. “It is our duty that we make part of the vaccine that we have reserved in the European Union available to others as soon as we are out of the woods,” he said. “It is not just a question of solidarity, but also of self-interest,” he said, referring to the infection situation in the Western Balkans, with which Slovenia is closely linked economically and socially.
