President told he supports the immunisation and will take the jab as soon as it becomes available. He also urged everyone to get vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as all practicalities of mass immunisation are solved. President Levits said: ‘Public health requires us to be ambitious and set precise goals. Latvia must coordinate vaccination programme so as to ensure that majority of population has access to the first dose of vaccine no later than two months from the arrival of sufficient batch of vaccines. In other words, Vaccination Programme Coordination Office must make sure that we can vaccinate 200,000 people a week. We are in a state of emergency. We need to be fully mobilised and ready to act, to put together an efficient, quick and safe vaccination programme to prevent the pandemic.’
To achieve this rather ambitious goal, the newly created Vaccination Programme Coordination Office will have to expedite a plan detailing every step of the vaccination – from identifying target population and maximum vaccination capacity to delivery of doses and efficient management of personnel, locations and vaccination procedures. Possible collaboration with Ministry of Defence, which has mass event management and planning experience, was also discussed due to the magnitude of the operation.
Vaccination Programme Coordination Office informed President about their dynamic approach to the management of vaccination programme, development of universal vaccination queue and schedule. manavakcina.lv has already been set up to let anyone register for vaccination. A special hotline will start taking calls later this week. You can also register through your GP or register collectively as an organisation. Vaccination software schedule will process these applications and assign priorities to various target groups and individuals who have opted to receive vaccine before others in their group. Office is also currently working on the estimation of indicative costs for the full vaccination programme.
According to Egils Levits, vaccination depends on successful and reliable identification of the whole population, and efficient communication about all the practicalities of the vaccination procedures that need to be explained to the people. Staff of the Office told the President that every resident of Latvia will be notified of the start of vaccination programme. There will be a possibility to reschedule the vaccination appointment in case of any conflicts with personal schedule, and those who oppose vaccination will be moved to the end of the line with a chance to undergo immunisation later on if they wish.
According to experts of the Coordination Office, people’s attitude towards COVID-19 vaccine is very different and one of the current priorities is to explain how vaccination will work to the public and different target groups because Latvia needs to achieve herd immunity as soon as possible.
