The Czech Republic’s outgoing government said on Friday it will propose mandatory vaccines for those over the age of 60. The move comes after the Food and Drug Administration recommended mandatory vaccines for those aged 59 in June. The Czech proposal will give the nation’s Central Antibody Factory the authority to execute the prescriptions.
If approved, it will set the minimum age limit for having the vaccine at 63. “This is not about your personal choice, your degree of risk aversion. This is not about the stupid citizen. It is about public health and general well-being,” the outgoing prime minister, Andrej Babis, said in his country’s largest newspaper, Pravo. Babis said that requiring the vaccinations would ensure that people over 60 have protected themselves against “different types of contagious diseases.”
The Czech government is not the first to adopt a mandatory vaccination legislation. Russia and several other countries, including the Czech Republic, also have legislation with a limit on how old children under the age of 18 are allowed to be vaccinated without parental consent. Babis said the country has made other changes under his government, but called the idea of mandatory vaccines “one of the big ones” that defined the fall of his party.
Formal debate on the proposal is set to take place this summer.