ZAGREB, 1 Feb 2022 - Roughly a hundred people on Tuesday gathered in front of the headquarters of the Croatian Institute of Public Health (HZJZ) in Zagreb to protest against COVID-19 protocols and testing in schools, and an estimated 60 people protested in Split.
Similar protests with just a score of protesters were registered in Zadar and Rijeka.
During the rally in Zagreb, protesters carried banners with the messages "Stop Terror against Children!", "No to COVID passes!", "Stop to Uniformity!", and the most vocal protesters criticised politicians, epidemiologists, educational workers and journalists.
The entrance to the HZJZ headquarters was guarded by riot police officers, while the protesters demanded a meeting with the HZJZ leadership to hand in their requests. At the end of the protest, one of the representatives of the rally was let in the building to hand in their demands.
During the rally, Andrija Klarić, who also led anti-vaxxers' protests in recent months, said that COVID certificates should be abolished as they were useless and he was also against the testing of healthy people, insisting that this would only be an irresponsible loss of money.
Marin Miletić of the parliamentary Opposition Bridge party, and MEP Ivan Vilibor Sinčić of the non-parliamentary Human Shield party called via Facebook on opponents to the COVID certificate to hold rallies.
A Religion teacher, Ivan Pokupec, told the Zagreb rally that not enough protesters had gathered, adding that the opponents should continue fighting for their cause in a silent manner until more protesters could turn out at rallies.
In Split, about 60 opponents rallied outside the county headquarters to criticise the plan for weekly testing of school children for coronavirus.
They declined to give statements to the press and some of them only expressed anger at media outlets.
HZJZ: Protests against COVID rules just put pressure on health workers
Ahead of protests against COVID rules, officials from the HZJZ said this morning that the protestors are just feigning care for the health of children and are in fact just putting pressure on health care workers.
"These undeclared organisers are just feigning care for children and their health and in fact are just using them as an instrument to achieve some other objectives they consider to be important," officials from the HZJZ said.
HZJZ said that the protests, which have been announced via social media by the "Free together" group, would just put pressure on healthcare workers and epidemiologists who have been doing their job in the best of faith for the last two years, adding that their recommendations are based on scientific evidence of the need for vaccination against coronavirus, in particular of the elderly.
“Protests, swearing, threats and everything else associated with that will not resolve the problems we have all been faced with during this epidemic," HZJZ officials said.
