The Ministry of Health essentially refuses to give preference to people outside the official lists and priorities of the vaccination strategy. We consider this to be an absolute disregard for all the health professionals who have been fighting in the front line for months. The Ministry of Health repeatedly calls on all hospitals that have been provided with vaccines against COVID-19 to follow the established procedures and rules for vaccination.
Hospitals have received several documents which clearly define not only the procedure for the registration, storage and administration of vaccines, but also specify more precisely the number of people to be vaccinated first at this stage, without exceptions. We will check with hospitals whether or not there are further violations of vaccination procedures and rules, if we find faults, we will demand accountability, including financial sanctions for hospital management.
The Ministry of Health stresses that the set-up system clearly determines the rules and if it is violated, it is an individual failure, as stated today by Bratislava Kramár University Hospital. The Ministry welcomes the fact that the hospital management has decided that a worker who has added persons outside the order to the official health lists will no longer work at the vaccination centre or participate in any way in vaccination. We also welcome the fact that Mrs Cibulk has also said that she wants to help with the awareness-raising campaign. At the moment, however, the best form of the campaign is voluntary work in hospitals, or information on the severity of COVID-19 and the importance of vaccination.

The Ministry of Health is pleased with the interest in vaccination, we understand that pressure can be exerted on vaccination centres to circumvent the rules. However, Slovakia is in a serious epidemic situation, we have high numbers of positive, sick, hospitalized, there are health workers among them, as well as firefighters, employees of network industries and so on, whose failure could seriously jeopardise the state's operation. Anyone from public celebrities, athletes, artists, the Ministry of Health has been asked to be ready to be vaccinated at the moment and, for example, to help in a communication campaign was asked for patience. If it is an incentive to encourage vaccination by the general public, they can do so in this way by publicly declaring their interest in vaccination, but only by the time we are able to vaccinate important professions or then risk groups of the population for health and state. We call on hospitals to treat vaccination requirements equally outside the established sequence.