Healthcare union lists Health Minister's COVID vaccine promises to show inconsistencies

Duvar English

Turkey's Healthcare and Social Service Laborers Union's (SES) Ankara office urged Health Minister Fahrettin Koca to stop making promises about vaccinations in the country with a tally of all his statements about the treatments to highlight the inconsistency.

"We urge the Health Minister, who has strayed from reality and science, to stop making statements about the vaccines," SES said in their statement dated April 28. 

The statements of Koca are as follows: 

• April 26, 2021 - "Sinovac failed to keep their promise"
• April 19, 2021 - "Citizens over 55 can now be vaccinated. I urge all our citizens to get inoculated"
• April 13, 2021 - "We'll get 30 million doses of the BioNTech vaccine"
• April 1, 2021 - "Our domestic vaccination will be ready soon"
• March 31, 2021 - "We agreed on 4.5 million doses of BioNTech to be delivered in April"
• March 11, 2021 - "Our vaccination schedule is working great, five domestic vaccines will start human trials in the near future, we want to vaccinate 50 million people before the fall"
• March 25, 2021 - "We will have 105 million doses of the vaccine by the end of May, vaccines for 52.5 million people will be secured by the end of May"
• Feb. 17, 2021 - "We will have a domestic vaccine by next fall, and 100 million doses of vaccine by the end of fall"
• Feb. 16, 2021 - "All these months' horrors will come down to a prick of the needle"
• Feb. 15, 2021 - "We will have administered a daily 500,000 vaccinations daily as of today"
• Feb. 11, 2021 - "We have vaccinated 3.5 percent of our population, put in orders for almost 130 million vaccines and will have started first phase trials for three vaccines within a week to 10 days"
• Feb. 10, 2021 - "Our country has supplied 15 million doses and signed for more than 100 million"
• Jan. 21, 2021 - "No problems for 20 million vaccines in January"
• Jan. 14, 2021 - "Vaccines are the only way to get rid of the pandemic"
• Jan. 7, 2021 - "We have definitively agreed to supply 50 million doses of vaccinations"
• Jan. 6, 2021 - "Three domestic vaccinations have petitioned for human trials"
• Dec. 9, 2020 - "We have ordered 50 million doses of the vaccine, will start vaccinations on 50 million citizens before fall"
• Dec. 6, 2020 - "We have to vaccinate 50 million people early on, we've signed for 50 million doses with Sinovac"
• Dec. 1, 2020 - "We will start vaccinations on Dec. 11 and have 10 million, or more likely 20 million doses of the vaccine in December"
• Dec. 25, 2020 - "We will have 550,000 doses of Pfizer by the end of the year"
• Dec. 24, 2020 - "We will vaccinate nine million people in the first phase"
• Dec. 9, 2020 - "We will have 50 million doses by the end of February, Turkey will have more vaccines than many other countries in the world in a few months"
• Nov. 25, 2020 - "We hope to have a vaccine before the end of the year"
• Nov. 21, 2020 - "We will get 10 million doses of the Sinovac vaccination in December"
• Nov. 18, 2020 - "We will be able to get vaccines for 10 million people in December"
• September 2020 - "We have signed for a total of 50 million doses in total"