As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, Bozinovic recently appeared on ”Interview of the week”, during which he spoke about the situation with the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Croatia, the excellent tourist season and more.
In the introductory part of the show, the Interior Minister spoke about the increased number of infected people, emphasising that we’re now coming to the end of the height of a fantastic 2021 tourist season, which is at the level of record 2019, when we’re talking about July and August. Compared to last year, he added, this year there were a lot more people present and activities going on, so infection growth was expected, including the fact that the Delta strain, which is much more contagious, is spreading rapidly and with apparent ease all around the world.
“We aren’t at all surprised by the increase in the number of infected people, but we’re entering autumn (…) and that’s why we are talking all the time about recommendations that always come down to the same – maintaining social distancing, wearing a mask indoors, ventilating indoors and vaccinating people,” he told HRT.
When all this is summed up, and when you see experiences from around the world, vaccination against the virus is, he believes, the only way out of the pandemic and the route we must continue to insist on – the more people get vaccinated, the smaller the reservoir is in which the virus will spread.
”Despite everything that has been going on, life mustn’t stop, I think that we in the Government and in the Civil Protection Directorate have shown a very high degree of understanding for what people can accept at a given moment. Our measures have never been so strict, nor have they been accompanied by any repressive action by the police, but we can’t just let the virus spread without any measures to make the environment more hostile for it in place. The minimum must remain,” he added.
There will be no new lockdowns, nor will there be any sort of curfew, he said, adding that we have learned that we can calibrate anti-epidemic measures, but the only real protection is vaccination.
President Zoran Milanovic said that “this is all getting very much on people’s nerves”, and Bozinovic says that this is not a normal situation which we’re used to, but the Government has a responsibility on its hands to protect people from the agent as much as possible.
“We have to take certain measures, we have to point out the dangers that are very real – more than 8,300 people in Croatia have died as a result of this virus. The danger is there, we have enough vaccines and everyone in Croatia can protect themselves in the most effective way possible,” he added.
Some of the arguments against vaccination in this case are that vaccinated people can both spread the infection and become infected themselves. Bozinovic cited the example of the Split hospital, where 93 percent of all those hospitalised were not vaccinated.
“Of course, some vaccinated people get sick, some of them do sadly die, but most of those in that situation who are vaccinated are older, they’re people who have various comorbidities, and despite vaccination, they fail to develop a sufficient level of immunity to protect them from SARS-CoV-2,” Bozinovic told HRT.
Since then, Andrej Plenkovic has come out to state that ”nobody can be forced to be vaccinated” given the fact that many portals have wrongly interpreted Bozinovic’s comments on vaccination.
“That isn’t correct. He was asked about covid certificates, for some reason people thought he was talking about mandatory vaccination, he wasn’t. Whoever has published that, please remove it,” asked Plenkovic.
“We can’t introduce the obligation to vaccinate for anyone because we said at the beginning that we wouldn’t do that and we’re sticking to it. We believe in the intelligence of Croatia’s residents. I don’t believe that there is anyone in Croatia who doesn’t know that covid has existed for more than eighteen months now,” he added.
He added that the government had done everything in their power to get people to have their vaccinations and that they weren’t about to force anyone’s hand.
“We can’t force anyone to get vaccinated, but at the same time life… has to go on,” he said, adding that minimal epidemiological measures are set to remain in place.
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