Deputy Health Minister: A campaign begins to encourage Roma community to get vaccinated against Covid-19

The Ministry of Health is taking measures to inform the Roma community about the vaccination against coronavirus. So far, about and less than 10% of this population has been immunized, Deputy Health Minister Alexander Zlatanov said at a briefing on June 22.

Today, a working meeting was held in the Ministry of Health, with representatives of health mediators.

Deputy Minister Zlatanov clarified that the purpose of the meeting was to highlight the problems associated with low immunization among the Roma population and to outline steps to increase immunization.

“At the moment, the period is very appropriate, given the low morbidity in the country and vaccines of all kinds are available. And in order to protect all people from a future wave, it is very important that people are immunized," Zlatanov said.

The conclusions at the meeting were that myths about the vaccines have taken hold among the Roma community in Bulgaria. People are scared, have a misconception, they are afraid of side-effects.

The first step is to inform these people with accurate information in different ways - through the people they respect, with examples of people from the show business that they like, the clergy who preach.

The second step is to emphasise that getting vaccinated is easy, and could be done either at temporary vaccination centres or at GPs. It needs to be explained that for people who do not have health insurance, will not be asked to pay for the vaccine, the deputy minister said.

Mediators will start work from today. Repeated meetings will be held over a period of 10 days, at which the effect of the actions will be considered.

“Vaccines should be given to the whole population fairly and equally, and no special conditions should be imposed on anyone. In addition to guaranteeing almost all vaccines approved by the EC, we guarantee that they are safe for people and free of charge for those who are not insured,” Zlatanov said.

According to health mediator Hristo Nikolov, the reason for the low vaccination rate among the Roma population is misinformation.

There are no financial incentives for the administration of doses of vaccines, for no one, whether among people who are Roma or not, the deputy minister said.