Is there any plan to make COVID-19 vaccination compulsory for Bulgarian children in the near future? No, that's not true: According to the Bulgarian Ministry of Health website, vaccination against COVID-19 is only recommended, not required. There are no announced changes on the website of the Bulgarian Ministry of Health and the website of the Bulgarian Ministry of Education, according to which the vaccination of children against COVID-19 is planned to become mandatory.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) published by @userzd7hs96xyd on September 20, 2023.
The Bulgarian text overlay reads (Translated from Bulgarian to English by Lead Stories Staff):
Mandatory vaccinations for Bulgarian children will soon be introduced.
The state is the enemy.
The text in red, as well as the small text below it, are translated from Bulgarian as follows:
The embodiment of the terror.
Krasimir Valchev, Minister of Education. GERB
The Bulgarian text below is translated as:
Teachers are required to question and monitor all children to determine whether they pose a risk
This is how the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Oct 25 10:43:23 2023 UTC)
No evidence or media reports from reliable news sites support this claim. A search for the phrase "Mandatory vaccination for Bulgarian children will soon be introduced," written in Bulgarian, performed by Lead Stories on October 25, 2023, using Google News' index of thousands of credible news sites, did not return any results.
According to the laws of the Republic of Bulgaria, there is a mandatory immunization calendar in the country for vaccination at an early age against diseases such as Hepatitis B, Tuberculosis, and others. All other vaccinations that are not part of this vaccination calendar, which is the case with COVID-19, are only recommended.
Although the claim does not directly mention COVID-19, it aims to instil that it is about vaccination against COVID-19, a particularly sensitive topic in Bulgarian society. The part of the claim that says that teachers will monitor if there are children showing symptoms in class, which was a practice in Bulgaria during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the posted photo of the Minister of Education Krasimir Valchev, who is in office from 2017 to 2021, during the first two years of the Covid pandemic, clearly and indirectly suggest that the claim aims to instil that vaccination of children against COVID-19 will become mandatory.
There are no announced decisions or plans on the website of the Bulgarian Ministry of Health or the Bulgarian Ministry of Education, according to which the COVID-19 vaccine will become part of the immunization calendar for children or adults. Moreover, during the pandemic, Bulgaria has never introduced mandatory immunization against COVID-19.
