Valeriu Gheorghita explains an extremely important official decision for millions of Romanians all over the country, one that will have a very big impact, and this is because it concerns the COVID certificate and the way in which it will be allowed to participate in certain activities for people.
Valeriu Gheorghita talks below about the explanation of the decision to allow the issuance of a COVID certificate including for people who have had a dose of vaccine, regardless of the type of vaccine used, something that is not applied in any other country in the European Union now.
"What was wanted by introducing this option, because we were at the preliminary discussions, was to not necessarily encourage the administration of a vaccine that consists of a single dose, namely the vaccine from the Johnson & Johnson company. Why?
Because from our data, a significant number of people were opting for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because they could download a digital certificate as soon as possible.
From this point of view, in order to maintain a fairness in terms of the person's option for a certain vaccine or another, which was not directed only by an administrative measure, it was proposed to have this possibility to issue the digital certificate after the first dose , obviously, provided it will be valid until the person completes his vaccination schedule.
If he does not complete his vaccination schedule on time, the validity of the certificate will be lost, but we wanted and the measure aims to practically encourage fair addressability to the available vaccines, because we know that at the moment the vaccines based on messenger RNA causes an immunological response, at least in antibodies, superior to vaccines based on viral vectors.
Even if the protection against severe forms, against hospitalizations and against death is similar, but from the perspective of the new circulating variants, including Omicron, we are primarily interested in having a sufficiently high level of protection. A sufficiently high level of protection at the community level, so basically that was the rationale, it's a medical one, to encourage equitable use of available vaccinations."
