Spain will keep list of people who refuse  Covid-19 vaccine, says health minister

Araceli Hidalgo, a 96-year-old living in a care home in central Spain, was the first person in the country to be vaccinated against Covid-19

Credit: Getty Images Europe

Spain will create a list of people who refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19 when they are offered jabs under the vaccination campaign the country is rolling out this week.

Salvador Illa, the health minister, said that vaccination was voluntary and there would be no consequences for those who refuse to take the shots, although he added that the information would be shared with Spain’s EU colleagues.

“We will have a registry […] of those people who have been offered [the vaccine] and have simply rejected it”, Mr Illa said in an interview on Spain’s La Sexta TV channel.  

“It is not a document that will be made public and it will be done with the utmost respect for data protection,” Mr Illa said, adding that registering people’s rejection of the jabs would avoid confusion over why certain individuals had not been vaccinated when it was their turn.

Spain has started administering the Pfizer vaccine, with 96-year-old Araceli Hidalgo becoming the country’s first person to receive a shot on Sunday.

A poll from early December on people’s willingness to be vaccinated carried out by the state CIS research body showed 28 per cent of Spaniards said they would refuse the shots, down from more than 40 per cent in September.

Mr Illa stressed that the best way to defeat the pandemic was for “everyone to be vaccinated”.

Spain’s public health service will call people to be vaccinated moving from highest-risk groups to lower-risk as the year advances, with the health ministry planning to deploy an average of 350,000 shots of the Pfizer vaccine per week over the next three months.

Spain’s second wave of Covid-19 had been tamed to some extent prior to December, but numbers have been creeping up once more, sparking fears of the third wave in the midwinter months.

On Monday 24,462 new cases were reported from the four-day Christmas weekend, although some under-reporting is expected at such a time of year.

The official number of deaths from Covid-19 has now topped 50,000, although the true figure is believed to be above 66,000 based on statistical studies of death registries.