Interview with former Minister of Health Rudolf Zajac
In the interview you will read:
– Why was Igor Matovič’s fight dangerous during the coronavirus,
– How the opposition participated in the bad situation with covid,
– What is the situation of our healthcare system?
– What Peter Pellegrini did wrong
– How would Zajac behave if Matovič or someone else gave him advice.
Why did you go to this study? Were you dissatisfied with how Slovakia handled the fight against the pandemic?
That was not the motivation. Peter Pažitný and his team, to which I belong, are aware of what is happening in the Slovak healthcare system, how it works, how it reacts to various burdens. We chose the topic of comparing the Slovak healthcare system under the burden of covid with another country in the European Union.
People would like to know how you went about it, because now the Attorney General’s office has seized your study and it’s about investigating possible criminal liability for the mismanagement of the pandemic…
Back in 2021, we made a so-called green book, but now we looked at it from a different point of view, which is excess mortality. That is, the number of people who died in addition compared to other periods. We did an analysis and found that there was an excess of mortality. Covid is indeed a disease that increases mortality. Then we looked at what the death rates are in other countries. The study was interpreted as scientific, it has nothing to do with politics or the Prosecutor General’s Office. We made a mirror of the death rate in Slovakia and then you can easily compare it with the death rate in other countries.
Were you surprised by the results of the study?
Not at all, but we are talking about the one whose boss is Pažitný. We were not surprised. We knew something was wrong here. A year before, we had already made the first analyses, in which we showed that Slovakia did not do well and that the Slovak healthcare system is not in a good situation.
In your opinion, what were the three biggest reasons on the basis of which Slovakia was unable to cope with the pandemic?
The first is the inability of the government to find optimal solutions at a time when the pandemic was raging here. The solutions were chosen by a person named Igor Matovič and his Minister of Health Marek Krajčí. But they did not correspond to what the experts suggested. The second political program is the opposition, and this must be said harshly, which has chosen antiCovid and antivaccination as the main one. So, the fact that this problem is here is part of the government coalition, but almost equally of the opposition.
And the third reason?
The team is the quality of the Slovak healthcare system, which has shown in this burden that we are much worse off than our citizens thought until now.
Continued on the other side.