When a journalist from the online news channel N1 stated that Croatia was not sufficiently vaccinated compared to the EU average, Croatian President Zoran Milanovic said he did not care, because “we are sufficiently vaccinated, we will not go beyond 50 percent … then they should fence us in with barbed wire, but they won’t do that”.
N1 is a TV partner of the left-wing US broadcaster CNN, which broadcasts news about Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. Alluding to the narrative that vaccinated people are protected from serious illness, Milanovic said: “We should know the aim of all this frenzy. If anybody tells me that the aim is to completely eradicate the Coronavirus, I will tell them that this is insane. It is impossible. What matters now is adjustment and resumption of normal life.”
According to the current paradigm, vaccinated people cannot be endangered at all. He also wanted to know what the goal of this “frenzy” was. “Get vaccinated. Then get vaccinated again. We want to wipe out Covid-19!” He said that was obviously impossible. The president must have alluded to the vaccination disaster in Israel, where despite a 90 percent vaccination coverage and the 3rd booster jab, infection rates, illnesses, hospitalization and deaths were skyrocketing. Israelis are now no longer allowed to enter Sweden and Portugal.
Milanovic then continued: “I start every day with CNN and these few TV channels. And I wonder, am I normal or are they crazy?” Commenting on the excessive focus on this topic in foreign media outlets, Milanović said: “The media frenzy over the Coronavirus is starting to grate on people’s nerves.”
He added: “Everything has been said. Those who have got vaccinated, have solved their problem. If you get vaccinated, you do not stand any chance of developing serious symptoms or consequences. It is then like the flu,” the president explained. “Everyone knows that… there is no chance of putting those people at risk,” the Croatian president said.
He also expressed surprise at the “obsessive culture of safety” being pushed by foreign media outlets. “No one can be absolutely safe and secure, there is no life without any risk or disease,” the president underscored.
“This amounts to sowing panic, and they are not the only ones to have been doing that since the beginning (of the pandemic). Simply, there is no absolute safety that excludes any possibility of getting sick. People develop thousands of more serious diseases, while we have been commenting on Covid for a year and a half.”
In a report by the online portal Index, Milanovic was quoted on the subject of Covid-19, saying that the assertion of absolute certainty cannot be continued indefinitely.
Many of his friends were vaccinated, some were not – but they were still his friends, he said.