Romania starts using AstraZeneca vaccine for immunizing the population
Starting today, Romania will begin immunization with the AstraZeneca vaccine, recommended for people aged between 18 and 55, with a second dose given after eight weeks. For this purpose, 180 new centers have been open across the country.
Up until last night, approximately 142,000 Romanians had been scheduled to be vaccinated with this serum, in the stage targeting people suffering from chronical diseases and workers in essential domains. The first shipment, of over 81,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses, has entered the country more than a week ago and has been distributed to the regional centers in Cluj, Craiova, Iaşi and Timişoara. Only 600 doses remained in Bucharest. Romania should receive, in February and March, 1,3 million doses from AstraZeneca – the third type of vaccine to be used in our country, after those from Pfizer and Moderna. Until then, Pfizer has raised the volume of doses delivered to our country. Over 196,000 doses have been delivered two days ago, after a slight delay at the beginning of last week, recorded in the delivery schedule, caused by the weather conditions in Germany. More than 686,000 Romanians have been vaccinated against COVID so far with serums coming from Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna and more than 60% of them have received both doses, to obtain the maximum level of protection.
New conditions for allowing access in Romania
Starting today, a new list of countries with a high epidemiological risk has been in place, the so-called yellow area, that implies a quarantine for all those entering Romania. States such as Spain, France, Italy, Great Britain, Belgium, Serbia, Germany, Hungary and The Republic of Moldova are on the list. People who arrive in Romania from those countries need to have a negative result of a PCR COVID test, not older than 72 hours before boarding the plane, or quarantine at home or at a declared location for 10 or 14 days, if they don’t have a test result. An exception to the rue is applied for people who have completed their vaccination against COVID, children under the age of three or those who have had COVID and have documents to prove that.
Request to finish the completion of disbanding the Institute of the Romanian Revolution in 1989
A group of revolutionaries and intellectuals ask, in a letter addressed to the Government and Parliament, the completion of an action to dismantle the Institute of The Romanian Revolution in December 1989, led by Ion Iliescu. The signatories consider that the activity of the institute has had a minor, partisan and unconvincing effect in essential matters of the Revolution and that, for that reason, it is unjustified that it continues to be state financed. It would be more appropriate that the task to establish who is guilty for the deaths in December 1989 be taken by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes – as shown in the letter signed by, among others, representatives of the Association of the Revolutionaries Without Privileges, of thew “Gheorghe Ursu” Foundation and of the Timişoara Society, by the members of the Group for Social Dialogue and by the former military chief prosecutor Dan Voinea. At the end of 2019, the Orban government has issued an emergency order to dismantle the Institute of The Romanian Revolution in December 1989, rejected by the parliament at the time. Afterwards, the Romanian president solicitated that the legislative reexamines the law under which the order had been rejected, but that never happened.
Alexandra Ioniță, RADOR
