Jobbik wants 80 percent wage subsidies for workers
Moderna vaccine in pipeline
The European Commission gave Moderna’s vaccine the provisional go-ahead on Wednesday, and the EU has ordered 160 million doses.
Vaccinations begin at retirement homes
Residents at Hungary’s four largest retirement homes began receiving their first doses of the coronavirus vaccine on Thursday, public news broadcaster M1 said. A total of some 500 employees and 800 residents have signed up for the vaccine at the four institutions.
Altogether 479 residents of the home on Pesti Road in Budapest’s 17th district — which became a major virus cluster during the first wave of the epidemic — are scheduled to receive the vaccine on Thursday, M1’s correspondent said.
Botond Sara, head of the Budapest government office, noted that more than 300 of the home’s residents were hospitalised with Covid-19 and 55 died from the disease in the spring.
Budapest Deputy Mayor Erzsebet Gy. Nemeth told the media that the institution had only been notified that it would be receiving the vaccines at midday on Wednesday and therefore had less than 24 hours to prepare for the inoculations. She said that in the future, care facilities should be notified on time before receiving their vaccines.
Meanwhile, some 400 residents and 75 percent of employees at a home in Budapest’s 15 district will also be getting the vaccine.
The third institution, in Pecs, in southern Hungary, has arranged the vaccination of 70 of its workers and 23 of its residents.
The fourth retirement home in Miskolc, in the north-east, will see 27 employees and 101 elderly receive the vaccine. About one-third of the institution’s residents and workers have already recovered from the virus, M1’s correspondent said.
Jobbik wants 80 percent wage subsidies for workers
The opposition Jobbik party has proposed providing an 80 percent wage subsidy to workers affected by the coronavirus crisis.
Daniel Z. Karpat, a deputy leader of the nationalist party, told a press conference on Thursday that Jobbik’s scheme would give people who have lost their jobs because of the epidemic a guaranteed income “under all circumstances”.
“All of the opposition parties are able and willing to support this solution,” he said.
Z. Karpat said some 850,000 people in 29 sectors were at risk of losing their jobs due to the economic impact of the spring lockdown, adding that the government had “barely helped five percent of them”.
Despite having set up an economic protection fund worth trillions of forints, the government gave these sectors “peanuts” in aid, he said, arguing that most of the funds had gone to projects like a hunting exhibition, space research and the upgrade of the Budapest-Belgrade railway line.
Z. Karpat said a reallocation of 65 billion forints (EUR 181.1m) within the central budget would be enough to finance 80 percent wage subsidies for those who need it.
