“With regard to the list of vaccinated people that is being mentioned – those are medical records and therefore confidential. The media will never get that list because it contains information such as the diseases a particular patient may have similarly to the way the media cannot access other registers of diseases that need to have their confidentiality protected if we want the health system to function and if we want the people to trust the system,” Kaić told a press conference held by the COVID crisis response team.
The epidemiologist explains that the vaccination rollout plan is being implemented in three stages that overlap and vaccination tables are often incorrectly presented, because they are not the list of priority groups for administration of shots.
The priority categories include people who have an increased risk of complications and doctors need to apply their expertise to determine who has priority, said Kaić, calling on the coordinating body of family doctors to prepare guidelines for doctors for administering jabs to their patients.
With regard to further deliveries of vaccines, Kaić said that the numbers sound optimistic “unless they trick us again.”
Until now 150,000 doses have been distributed throughout the country, and by the end of February we expect another 200,000 doses and another 400,000 in March. There is no written information regarding deliveries after that.
Kaić reiterated that reporters and jurists cannot interpret the vaccination plan and people with increased risk of complications or death due to diseases they suffer from have priority. “We do not consider that jumping the queue. Jumping the queue means young, healthy people who get vaccinated just because they think they are more important than others,” said Kaić.
There are medical staff and people who are not in aged care facilities but because of their health, deserve to be vaccinated as do people with chronic diseases and the elderly, he added.
In Croatia, 1.7 million residents old or patients with comorbidities
The head of the Fran Mihaljević hospital for infectious diseases, Alemka Markotić said that things should not be pushed to absurdity.
In our country there are about 1.7 million people in old-age cohorts or who are patients with comorbidities. All of them have different health conditions, diagnoses and are at different stages of their treatment, and it is their physicians who can assess who need to be vaccinated, Markotić said.
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