May the 3rd, 2021 - The Croatian vaccination platform, Cijepi se, has been in the news for all the wrong reasons of late. A total breakdown of the online vaccine registration platform has highlighted the difficulty Croatia continues to face in getting a good job done well at the government level, but despite that, Health Minister Beros has still had positive things to say...

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, Croatian Health Minister Vili Beros is obviously trying to repair the damage caused by numerous difficulties that arose from and regarding the Cijepi se vaccination registration platform, so he decided, oddly, to boast that Croatia is the best in the European Union in terms of the daily number of vaccinated people.

"We're moving in the right direction. Croatia has the largest number of daily vaccinations in the EU, and according to e-VACCINES, every fifth Croatian citizen is vaccinated against COVID-19,'' Health Minister Beros wrote on the social media platform Twitter.

Health Minister Beros was referring to the data from the global database Our world in data for April the 29th on his Twitter post, and the Croatian Institute for Public Health announced today that a record number of vaccinations had been achieved on that particular day across Croatia, with 46,887 doses administered in one single day, which is indeed impressive. However, unfortunately, the next day the number of doses administered in Croatia was almost 20 thousand less.

“According to the data from the central register of vaccinated persons, e-Vaccinated, on the 30th of April, as many as 28,394 doses were administered while on the 29th of April, Croatia achieved an absolute record in terms of coronavirus vaccination with 46,887 people getting the vaccine in just one single day,'' they announced from the Croatian Institute for Public Health.

Of course, coronavirus vaccination praise cannot be based purely on the events of a single day or event, and Health Minister Beros presented the Croatian Government with a plan according to which vaccination will be accelerated in the third phase and that it will be performed seven days a week for twelve hours per day. The capacities of the Ministry of Defense and the Red Cross will be mobilised, the number of vaccination sites will be increased, and family doctors will be tasked with registering their patients who haven't expressed the need for vaccination, and they will be called separately.

Although both those wanting the vaccine and doctors continue to point out significant issues with the functioning of the Cijepi se vaccine platform, Health Minister Beros is still claiming that the platform is working as it should be.

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April the 27th, 2021 - Croatian IT expert Marko Rakar, who has more than thirty years of experience in the field under his belt, has publicly criticised the now failed Cijepi se vaccination platform, referring to it as sloppy and irresponsible.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, IT expert Marko Rakar spoke on N1 recently about the problem with the Cijepi Se vaccination platform, which, according to reports, doesn't function at all, and which some larger healthcare institutions across the country have totally given up on using. Health Minister Vili Beros, on the other hand, says that everything is working - maybe not perfectly, maybe not the way they would like, but - it's still working.

"The question is whether there's a Cijepi Se vaccination platform at all," Rakar said at the beginning.

"It's merely a form on the Internet that doesn't perform even basic data collection properly. The Ministry's statement differs drastically from the Minister's interpretation of it. But the fact it isn't working has been confirmed by the 200,000 people who signed up, just 5,600 of them were referred through the platform. And 4,000 people, myself included, were wiped off it.

We know the Cijepi Se vaccination platform isn't working, everyone who has used it has testified that it's unusable, that it isn't integrated, that the data is incorrect... It happens that you have to enroll yourself on the platform, and a doctor then has to examine everything and manually transcribe it all somewhere else. What then is the point of the platform? Is it okay for their job to involve retyping something from one screen to another?'' Marko Rakar asked.

He said that it has been known for fifteen months now that there will be mass vaccination against the novel coronavirus taking place, and that there has been enough time to organise the system.

"Our Health Ministry is acting as if everything has come as a big surprise for which they'd not prepared. But doctors carry out vaccinations every day on a number of other grounds, on newborns, school children, they do flu vaccinations… It's unclear how this situation happened. Looking through a series of such bizarre events, we can conclude that someone needed to make some money and deliver something for the sake of something delivered,'' Rakar added.

He explained how long it takes to make a platform like the Cijepi Se vaccination platform.

"If we look at it very simply, what people can see through the Cijepi Se page can be done in one afternoon, but what lies behind all of that is much more important - the data must be shared with HZZO's IT systems, with hospitals, it must be compared with other databases…

However, those are stable, well-documented systems. In seven days this should be able to be done without much trouble. Considering that this has been being talked about for fifteen days now, we'd have been able to develop such a platform twice in that period,'' said Rakar.

It is, he added, a very simple task that is repeated every day and which appears very often in the work of people engaged in the development of such systems.

“This application with such specifications is at the level of high school education or for the first or second year of college. There's no excuse for it not to be working well. The vaccine system isn't integrated. This means that when you enter an OIB or MBO the system won't check if you've already been vaccinated or not, but this check can happen at later stages. If these people end up being invited again, we can say that it absolutely does not work at all,'' said Rakar.

A few days ago, the Health Ministry confirmed that a number of people who had signed up to be vaccinated had been deleted from the Cijepi Se vaccination platform.

"The first 4,000 people who applied were deleted. Of the 4,000 people who were wiped off the system, some must have become infected in the meantime, and someone could have since ended up on a respirator. The question of the responsibility for such a sloppy platform arises. I've been involved with informatics for over 30 years and I've never seen something so sloppy or irresponsible,'' concluded Marko Rakar.

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