Spain will create registry of people who refuse COVID vaccine

Spain's Health Minister Salvador Illa stated on Monday that the COVID vaccine in will not be mandatory in Spain, but if a person refuses it, that refusal will be recorded in a database.

"What will be done is a registry, which will be shared with our European partners... of those people who have been offered it and have simply rejected it," Said Illa on Spanish television. "It is not a document which will be made public and it will be done with the utmost respect for data protection," Illa continued.

This is not the first time that a country's government has called for stricter tracking of the public regarding the novel coronavirus.

According to IFL Science, the names of those people who refuse the vaccine "for whatever reason" will go into said registry, which will be made available to authorities across the European Union despite the promise of data privacy.

Spain started its vaccination campaign on Sunday amid a resurgence of the pandemic that has officials and the public alike worried. Spain currently has one of the highest rates in the world of both cases and deaths per capita, and it has been this way since March.

Ironically though, the Spanish public is not very eager for the vaccine, with an estimated 64 percent of Spaniards saying that they strongly agreed that they would get one as soon as it were made available. Most experts agree that 70 percent of the population would need to get the vaccine before lockdown restrictions could be eased.

"The way to defeat the virus is by vaccinating all of us," said Illa.