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Spain plans to collect and share with other European Union nations information on residents who decide not to get vaccinated against Covid-19, the country’s health minister said on Monday. The Spanish Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, stressed that vaccination will not be mandatory, but said that a registry would be created that would include all people who rejected the vaccine after being summoned by the Spanish public health service to get vaccinated.
“Refusals to vaccination will be kept in a registry,” Illa said in an interview with La Sexta, a Spanish television channel. “This is not a public document and it will be done with the utmost respect for data privacy.”
Illa said that the vaccination was voluntary, but “we all see that the best way to defeat the virus is by vaccinating all of us, the more the better.” Vaccination, he added, should be considered “an act of solidarity towards our loved ones and our citizens.”
Illa’s comments came a day after Spain launched its vaccination program, with the aim of vaccinating 2.5 million people between January and March, all of them within priority health groups, starting with residents of residences in the elderly and the healthcare professionals who care for them. But the vaccination plan has also become political football. On Monday, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, mayor of Madrid and spokesman for the main opposition Popular Party, blamed the government for a “lack of information” about the vaccine, which has caused many people to remain reluctant to receive it.
The vaccination plan should be “an exercise in transparency, not propaganda,” Martínez-Almeida said in an interview with Spanish national radio.
