Spain plans to register for those who refuse the Covid vaccine

Spain will create a database of those who refuse to be vaccinated against the coronavirus and share it with the rest of the EU, the country’s health minister said.

Salvador Illa told La Sexta television on Monday that the list would be private and would be respected according to the law.

“This is not a document that will be made public and it will be done with the utmost respect for data protection,” he said in the broadcast interview.

Illa added that the way to beat the virus was “to vaccinate us all, the better”.

“What will be done is a register, which will be shared with our European partners of those who have been proposed and who have simply rejected it,” he said.

How open are the Spanish to the vaccine?

The proportion of Spaniards refusing to be vaccinated against Covid-19 fell to 28% in December from 47% last month, according to a survey released last month.

The survey by the state-funded CIS research institute found that 40.5% of those surveyed are willing to receive the jab, while 16.2% would if it turns out that it is. is “reliable”.

Regional authorities will contact people when it is their turn to be vaccinated, the government said on Monday.

The government expects between 15 million and 20 million people out of 47 million people to be vaccinated against the virus by June.

What is the current situation in Spain?

As in other EU countries, Spain launched its vaccination campaign on Sunday. Araceli Hidalgo, a 96-year-old woman from Guadalajara, was the first person in the country to receive the blow.

Spain is one of the most affected countries in Europe. The government has purchased doses of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine developed in Germany, although it is not mandatory.

More than 50,000 people have died from COVID-19 in Spain, according to official figures, with more than 1.8 million infections recorded.

A nationwide curfew is in place on mainland Spain between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. and will expire in May. Non-essential businesses, such as restaurants and bars, have been closed and inbound flights from the UK have been severely restricted amid fears surrounding a new variant of the virus. Only Spanish nationals or legal residents can enter the country by air from Great Britain.