According to State Sanitary and Health Inspectorate director Renata Mladenovska at a press conference on Wednesday, children who have not received the DTaP vaccine to prevent pertussis will only be prohibited from daycare centers if the Ministry of Health adopts the recommendation made by the Infectious Diseases Commission to contain the whooping cough epidemic in Skopje and if it directs health inspectors to conduct extra audits.

Regarding the meeting of the Infectious Diseases Commission on Tuesday to talk about stopping the whooping cough from spreading, Mladenovska stated that the State Sanitary and Health Inspectorate’s current responsibility was limited to punishing parents who chose not to vaccinate their children. She stated that their health inspectors were auditing immunization sites to look into vaccination documentation, as instructed by the Ministry of Health.

Asked whether inspectors had issued any fines yet, Mladenovska said they had. “Yes. Regularly, given that the vaccination points send us their lists of parents with their children’s first and last names,” she said.

“We have been issuing a lot of fines,” she said. “How this ends is the more important question. Some parents agree to pay the fine, but that doesn’t solve the problem because the child still remains unvaccinated.”

“Some parents don’t want to pay the fine and end up in court, where they are issued a warning and have to pay the legal costs,” Mladenovska said.According to her, an attempt has been made to contain the pertussis epidemic that has been declared on the territory of Skopje by the Infectious Diseases Commission, which recently recommended that health inspectors conduct special audits in day care centers to determine whether they admitted children who had not received a whooping cough vaccination. She did, however, recall that it was the inspectors of the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy who were responsible for verifying the immunization status of children attending day care centers.

She said, “The State Sanitary and Health Inspectorate is competent to sanction parents who did not vaccinate their child,” and mentioned that the fines were payable in denars and ranged from EUR 300 to 650.

In line with the Law on the Protection of the Population against Infectious Diseases, both in the case of the declared measles epidemic of 2019 and in the case of the active pertussis epidemic, the State Sanitary and Health Inspectorate will ban children who had not received the DTaP vaccine from day care centers only if the recommendation of the Infectious Diseases Commission, as an advisory body of the Minister of Health, is adopted, and if the Ministry of Health instructs the inspectorate to carry out special audits in day care centers aimed at inspecting the vaccination certificates on DTaP vaccines provided by the vaccination points,”

Mladenovska explained.

She stated that the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy will carry out its own inspections, which have been ongoing since the start of the epidemic, until that time.

She also mentioned that vaccination sites across the country would be inspected by health inspectors “from a sanitary and hygienic point of view,” to determine whether or not they had enough anti-shock therapy, enough vaccine transport coolers, and proper disposal of medical waste.