Breaking – government wants to vaccinate everybody above 45

GPs received two emails about the new program from the National Health Insurance Fund of Hungary on Tuesday. Their content is that since large quantities of vaccines are expected to arrive in Hungary at the end of April, the government plans to inoculate everybody above 45 in only ten days.

According to telex.hu, news came on Monday that Botond Sára, leader of the Budapest Metropolitan Government Office, promised money for the GPs if they use Sinopharm, but later the central team denied that.

István György, head of the central team, wrote in the emails that the government plans mass inoculation

between April 26-30, and May 3-5.

He clears that, thanks to the large quantities of vaccines expected to arrive in the next few days, the program needs the active cooperation of the whole Hungarian healthcare system.

However, based on Budapest GPs, many of the people refuse to accept Sinopharm vaccines. Telex.hu wrote before that there are GPs who care for more than 2,000 people, but they could convince only a few dozens of them to take the Chinese jab.

The news website says that, based on the letters, the government would like to inoculate all those who registered and are above 45.

That is probably because the new variants of the virus are more dangerous for the younger generations than the original one starting to spread last spring.

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The more people get vaccinated, the faster “normal life” can return and the stronger protection can be gained against a fourth wave of the pandemic, the state secretary for regional public administration said on Wednesday.

István György, who is also the head of the central team in charge of the national vaccination programme, told an online press conference that

the number of people vaccinated exceeded 3.36 million, close to 60 percent of whom are older than 60.

He noted that more than 90 percent of those who registered for vaccination in this age group have received their jabs, noting that “a few ten thousand” of them with an acute underlying illness could not be subject to receiving any type of vaccine.

As regards the age group of 18-54, György noted that 54 percent of the 2,362,000 who registered for vaccination have received their jabs.

An acceleration of the vaccination drive is expected from the weekend with the arrival of a consignment of 600,000 doses of Sinopharm,

he said.

György said that the government was introducing a pilot system for vaccination reservation. In the first round, some 70,000 residents in and near Budapest, in Pécs, Debrecen and Szeged can participate, he said. They will be sent a text message on Wednesday which they can use to book online their vaccination for next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Source: portfolio.hu, MTI