Hungary has enough vaccine, says minister

Hungary has a sufficient amount of coronavirus vaccines, Gergely Gulyás, the prime minister’s chief of staff, told parliament’s justice affairs committee on Tuesday.

In his yearly briefing to the committee, the minister said that a total 10 million vaccine doses were available, adding that the government was working to increase the number of people inoculated with a booster jab to 4-5 million. “Even if everybody asked for Pfizer as the third jab, we’d have enough to go round,” he added.

The minister said

the range of services restricted to holders of vaccination certificates would be defined depending how the Covid situation panned out.

Meanwhile, Gulyás said that the pandemic was putting a great strain on public administration. In the spring, staff had to coordinate administration of 200,000 jabs on certain days, while they also had to manage over 200,000 job protection subsidy applications and 22,000 applications for research and development aid, he said.

Answering a question concerning whether vaccinations would be mandatory, Gulyás noted that

Austria had been the only EU country so far to do so, adding that the Hungarian government has introduced compulsory vaccination in public administration.

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On another subject, Gulyás said that central subsidies for civil groups had increased from an annual 3.4 billion forints (EUR 9.3m) to 10 billion forints between 2012 and 2021, while financing for religious organisations had tripled since 2010. Ethnic Hungarian communities now receive about ten times as much assistance, while the Hungary Helps programme has launched 170 projects in 50 counties to help some half a million people stay in their homeland, he said.