Monday, April 5th, 2021
Access for state media only
Hungary restricts vaccination coverage
In the fight against Covid-19, Hungary is going its own way and is already administering vaccines from Russia and China. However, only state media are allowed to make recordings of the vaccination campaign. Independent journalists are excluded – because they supposedly interfere.
Hungary is restricting journalistic coverage of the ongoing vaccination campaign against the coronavirus. According to an internal circular from the hospital supervisory authority that became known on Sunday in Budapest, only the state, government-affiliated media holding company MTVA is allowed to film and take photos in the hospitals and doctors’ surgeries that are vaccinated.
MTVA is allowed to make the pictures and videos available to other journalists free of charge. The opposition politician Krisztina Baranyi, independent district mayor in Budapest, published the newsletter on Facebook. In this, the authority justifies the access restriction for media with the fact that they would disrupt the vaccination activity.
A journalist in the southwestern Hungarian city of Nagykanizsa experienced this restriction on Sunday. He wanted to have himself photographed while he was being vaccinated. However, he was banned from doing so, citing the new regulation, as reported by the government-friendly news portal “index.hu”.
Hungary’s right-wing government has put the state and most of the private media on course with economic and administrative pressure. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has come under international criticism for this restrictive media policy.
The vaccination campaign in Hungary deviates from the approval procedure of the European Medicines Agency EMA. For several weeks now, the country has been administering the preparations Sinopharm from China and Sputnik V from Russia to its citizens. The Hungarian Medicines Agency Ogyei recently granted emergency approval to the Chinese vaccine Cansino.
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