Vaccination will be a requirement for obtaining job-keeping payments, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and Labour Minister Josip Aladrovic said on Thursday.

“One can’t expect to receive support without making a minimum contribution to health safety,” Plenkovic said, adding it would be “fair” if payment beneficiaries were vaccinated, contributing that way to health security when the government had ensured enough vaccines and abundantly helped businesses affected by the COVID-19 crisis.

He said the Croatian Employment Service would define the measures to link vaccination and job-keeping payments.

Plenkovic said it was no accident that the government decided today to donate 310,000 vaccines to neighbouring countries, adding that Croatia had 1.3 million doses available for administration.

He said he hoped the COVID-19 situation in the autumn would not require horizontal support measures again, i.e. equal payments for all affected sectors.

Aladrovic said almost all sectors could operate without restrictions now, so horizontal support was no longer needed. “We are replacing horizontal measures with targeted ones for specific sectors.”

He said the epidemiological and economic crises were connected because more people vaccinated against COVID meant fewer consequences for the economy. “One of the aspects of such an economic link is to stimulate people to get vaccinated, to connect epidemiological and economic measures.”

Aladrovic said that, economically, the state could no longer “suffer damage” because part of the population “refuse to be vaccinated.”

He said there would be no coercion or obligatory vaccination. The wish is to “stimulate those socially responsible about vaccination to weather the crisis better economically.”

The target sectors for job-keeping payments would be hospitality, hotels, the event industry, occasional transport and travel agencies.

Aladrovic conceded that the state could no longer maintain the fiscal burden of the previous job-keeping payments, saying it was more appropriate to target “specific sectors which really have objective problems in this crisis.”