Orders received for over 2,600 jabs for matura students, staff

Ljubljana – The National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ) has received an order for 2,625 shots of Corona-19 vaccine for final-year secondary school students taking the matura exam this year and the staff involved, while others will receive the leftover shots. Almost 17,000 students will take the school-leaving exam this year. The vaccination is voluntary.

The government has included the final-year secondary school students among priority groups for vaccination to enable them to prepare for the exam without worrying about the risk of infection.

Students had until noon yesterday to apply for the vaccination that is to take place on Friday.

The students over 18 who applied for the vaccination will receive the AstraZeneca vaccine, while the underage students will be inoculated with the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccines. The NIJZ has received 47 orders for the latter, the institute told the STA.

According to the NIJZ, the number of ordered shots does not equal the number of students who applied for vaccination, as some vaccination centres have leftover shots that will be used.

The Ljubljana Community Health Centre has received 1,255 applications for vaccination from final-year secondary school students and staff taking part in the matura exam, the centre told the STA.

In Maribor, 239 students and five teachers have applied, the head of the community health centre, Jernej Završnik, said. This is 13% of the total 1,800 students from the area.

Završnik expects more students to express the wish to be vaccinated in the coming days, so he proposes ordering enough vaccine for all 1,800 students.

“The shots that may not be used can then be used for others, as we have plenty of people interested. The past weekend we had almost 500 additional people applying for vaccination,” he said.

The Celje community health centre has received 112 applications and the Koper centre 102, of whom 92 were students and ten teachers, the centre’s medical director Ljubica Kolander Bizjak told the STA.

Kolander Bizjak said she did not know what kind of share of final-year secondary school students this is but she assessed that the students’ response had been substantial.

In the northern part of the western Primorska region, 285 students and 23 members of staff have applied for vaccination.

Assistant director of the Nova Gorica Health Community Centre Mojca Vidic told the STA some parents had subsequently wanted to cancel their children’s application to vaccination but the problem was that the lists did not contain names.

She warned though that students who have other school-leaving exams had not been included in the vaccination programme although these exams were equally important for their future.

The head of the Covid-19 task force, Mateja Logar, told the press today that no additional vaccination date had been set before the first round of matura exams.

Vaccination ahead of the autumn round of the exams has not been discussed yet, she said.

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