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Healthcare: Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis : Vaccination in Romania is increasingly lower
Vaccination in Romania is increasingly lower and there is action against immunisation, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Vytenis Andriukaitis told a meeting on Thursday in Bucharest with NGO representatives as part of an official visit to Romania.
He said Romania is sharing a border with Ukraine and it would suffice for people from Ukraine to arrive in Romania. We should remember, he said, that vaccination is increasingly lower in Romania and there is even action against immunisation. We do not know what the aim of such crazy game is, he added. He also warned the Romanian civil society that the action against vaccination runs contrary to science, adding that he cannot understand such action by which it is alleged to conspiracies that get very popular because they are easy to explain and easy to understand. We all see such conspiracy theories, he said, and then pharma companies being accused for the situation of vaccines.
State Secretary with Romania's Interior Ministry Raed Arafat said that failure to vaccinate children against poliomyelitis could endanger Romania, given that there is an outbreak of the disease in Ukraine.
"There is a poliomyelitis outbreak in Ukraine and we have a problem in the country in that many do not get vaccinated and do not get their children immunised. By not vaccinating the children against poliomyelitis we will truly endanger us. If somehow the disease spreads to Romania, the unvaccinated are at risk of going down with poliomyelitis," said Arafat.
He added that in instances where children are not vaccinated because their parents cannot get to their family physicians, they could be immunised in schools. "If the problem is hard access to the family physicians for vaccination, it should be seen whether the unvaccinated could be immunised in schools," said Arafat.
As far as the possibility of an epidemic breaking out in Romania because of refugees, Arafat said the World Health Organisation released an opinion that the likeliness of such epidemic is extremely small and even improbable.