Original article (in Croatian) was published on 19/05/2023
The Croatian Institute of Public Health has decided that Covid-19 is no longer a topic of public importance. Spreaders of disinformation use this to promote baseless theses.
The Croatian Institute of Public Health no longer wants to talk about Covid-19.
They concluded that “the public is widely informed” about everything that needs to be known about the Covid-19 epidemic in Croatia, so the HZJZ decided “that no further comments on the topic of the end of the epidemic will be made”.
Here is the exact quote, contained in the response to the query sent to the HZJZ by N1 television, asking why the HZJZ administration headed by Krunoslav Capak decided to ban Bernard Kaic, the chief epidemiologist of the HZJZ, from taking part in an already arranged interview on the show “Tocka na tjedan”:
“The Croatian Institute of Public Health did not introduce ‘silenzio stampa’. In the statements made on May 11, immediately after the declaration of the end of the pandemic, by the director of the HZJZ, Krunoslav Capak, and the deputy, Ivana Pavic Simetin, everything was said on this topic, and we additionally published on the website recommendations for action after the declaration of the end of the COVID-19 epidemic. Also, with the director’s appearance in the media that day and in HTV’s Dnevnik, topics related to the course of the epidemic were widely covered.
From the very beginning to the end of the epidemic, HZJZ experts were available daily to all media houses and the public, including N1, to which we made statements countless times and secured guest appearances. Considering that the public is widely informed about the epidemic of COVID-19 and its end, it has been decided within our institution that further comments on the topic of the end of the epidemic will not be made and that we will focus all our capacities on performing regular activities to preserve public health”.
The quoted statement of HZJZ contains two problematic claims.
The first, that the end of the Covid-19 pandemic has been declared, is not correct, although it has been frequently repeated in the public space in recent days. The decision of the Government of the Republic of Croatia declared the end of the epidemic in Croatia, and earlier the World Health Organization announced that it no longer considers Covid-19 a global health crisis (that is, in the terminology used by the WHO, public health emergency of international concern – PHEIC), but it did not declare the end of the pandemic.
It is believable that the HZJZ is aware of this and that it is a slip. However, the second claim from the quoted statement, according to which “the Croatian public is widely informed about the epidemic of COVID-19 and its end”, is much more controversial. The inaccuracy of this thesis is very clearly reflected in the (dis)information circulating in the Croatian public space, as well as in the statistically recorded consequences of the spread of Covid-19 in Croatia.
Disinformers against cover-ups
Attempts to quietly consign the epidemic in Croatia to history without a meaningful public discussion about the quality of the management of the biggest public health crisis of this century were immediately used by the most active Internet disinformers.
Marginal web portals, whose business model is based on the monetization of disinformation, i.e. on revenue from advertising services based on clicks attracted by emotionally incendiary content, began to repeat their old theses: that the danger of the Covid-19 pandemic was deliberately overblown for someone to benefit from the resulting crisis, that vaccines against Covid-19 are actually useless or even dangerous, and that the spread of Covid-19 should have been ignored instead of trying to be suppressed [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].
For them, the attempts to abruptly stop the public debate about Covid-19 are proof that they were right all along, that the disinformation they are publishing is actually correct and that they are trying to cover up a big conspiracy behind the pandemic.
Public figures who most persistently promoted disinformation claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, such as the discredited scientist Gordan Lauc and the controversial businessman Nenad Bakic, as well as opposition MPs from the ranks of the national-populist right, Marin Miletic from Most, and Stephen Nikola Bartulica from the Homeland Movement, also received an argument in favour of the correctness of their factually unfounded views [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10].
From the margins to the mainstream
Such considerations, despite being factually unsubstantiated, also reach the media mainstream. Branimir Pofuk published a column in Vecernji list on May 16 in which he makes a series of incorrect claims and unfounded theses, referring readers to Gordan Lauc as an important source of information. On his Facebook profile, Lauc published Pofuk’s text, which is available on the web portal accessible only to Vecernji list subscribers.
“The end of the pandemic without victory bells and requiems is not consistent with the conviction that we were in a peril more dangerous than war”, this is the title of Pofuk’s article, in which the author asks how it is possible that “an ordinary administrative decision first by the World Health Organization, and then by our Government” suddenly ended the Covid-19 pandemic.
The pandemic, as we have already established, is not over. The virus continues to spread around the world, but the conditions in which it spreads are no longer the same: it has mutated into strains that cause a milder clinical picture in those infected, and the significantly reduced number of hospitalizations and deaths is made possible by immunity acquired through vaccination and/or overcoming Covid-19.
According to the official announcement from May 15, in the past seven days, 252 new cases of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus were recorded in Croatia, and 17 people died. On May 15, there were 205 patients with Covid-19 in the hospital, and four patients were on ventilators.
In other words, in the last three and a half years, Covid-19 has become much less dangerous than it originally was, but it is still not harmless.
Epidemic more deadly than war
Furthermore, the very title of Pofuk’s text easily leads the reader to unfounded conclusions. The Covid-19 epidemic in Croatia, contrary to the claim from the title of Pofuk’s column in Vecernji list, was indeed more dangerous than the war.
As of May 19, 2023, official statistics record 18,230 victims of the new coronavirus. The exact number of those killed in the Homeland War is not known, but various estimates indicate the number of civilian and military victims in the range of 15 to 18 thousand [1, 2, 3].
The Vecernji list columnist, however, does not believe the official figures. He claims that we will never know the exact number of victims of Covid-19, but states that “too many deaths are attributed exclusively to COVID”. Of course, Pofuk does not present any evidence for this claim.
In reality, data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that official figures may even underestimate the total number of victims of the epidemic in Croatia. Here is what the National Bureau of Statistics says about the excess mortality in Croatia since the beginning of the epidemic:
“Looking at the period since the epidemic of the disease COVID-19 was officially declared in the Republic of Croatia, the number of deaths from March 2020 to February 2023 increased by 12.4% compared to the five-year average for the same period, that is, there were 19,671 more deaths.
In December 2020, there were the most deaths in the Republic of Croatia in one month so far, i.e. 7,608 deaths. Compared to the five-year average for the same month, this is an increase of 63.9% or 2,967 more deaths”.
Attached to this post is a chart showing excess mortality over time. The largest number of excess deaths was recorded in the winter of 2020 and 2021, that is, precisely at the time when Covid-19 spread the most in Croatia. In both cases, the death toll began to fall after non-pharmacological epidemiological measures aimed at limiting the spread of the virus were tightened.
Source: National Bureau of Statistics
It should also be emphasized that the official figures do not include people who died as a result of recovering from Covid-19. Various studies show an increased risk of death in persons who have recovered from Covid-19 up to 18 months after the illness. The increased risk of death is mainly associated with complications in the cardiovascular system [1, 2, 3, 4].
In other words, the total number of victims of Covid-19 in Croatia is enormous, larger than the population of cities the size of Sveta Nedelja, Dugo Selo, Porec or Metkovic.
Relativization based on factual and logical errors
Despite all this, Pofuk in his column expresses the opinion that the non-pharmacological epidemiological measures used to suppress the spread of the virus around the world were not only unnecessary but also discriminatory. That this is not true either, is shown by the legal analysis of the Office of the Ombudsman, which explicitly claims that the covid-certificates were not discriminatory for the majority of citizens. The only social group for whom the measures could be discriminatory are persons who could not receive the vaccine due to their impaired health, according to the analysis of the Office of the Ombudsman.
Pofuk repeats another argument that is popular among those who use disinformation to relativize the threat that Covid-19 poses to public health – that there is censorship in the media. Here is the exact quote:
“Let’s not be fooled, in our mainstream media, as in the world, censorship reigned. Corona’s dogmas were not to be questioned”.
It can be assumed that Pofuk believes that those who share his view that Covid-19 was never particularly dangerous were censored in the media. The problem is that such an attitude cannot be based on any evidence or facts; on the contrary, the data show that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has killed almost seven million people in the world. Without the rapid development of the vaccine, that number would have been much higher; it is estimated that vaccines against Covid-19 have saved millions of lives [1, 2, 3, 4].
Facts from the real world clearly illustrate why advocates of the thesis that the epidemic of a deadly infectious disease should be ignored are not particularly represented in the media; the job of journalists is to publish accurate and verified information, not to open public space for factually unfounded views. What this columnist unjustifiably calls censorship is, therefore, reporting that adheres to professional and ethical standards in journalism.
Finally, it should be noted that Pofuk’s article, despite numerous logical and factual errors, was published in one domestic mainstream media. If Pofuk’s thesis about censorship were correct, it can be assumed that his text would also be censored.
What the state does not want to talk about
Now that, through the presentation of the abundance of disinformation circulating in the Croatian public space, we have established the evident inaccuracy of the HZJZ’s claim that the Croatian public is “widely informed about the COVID-19 epidemic”, it is necessary to look back at the real reasons why the institution led by Krunoslav Capak does not want to talk about Covid-19.
An important insight in this sense is provided by the press conference that Capak and Minister of Health Vili Beros held after the decision to declare the end of the epidemic in Croatia. When journalists tried to ask them if they had made a mistake in the past three years, or if they would have done something differently with today’s knowledge, they encountered a lack of self-criticism.
Moreover, the blame for the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic in Croatia was placed on the vaccine by the director of HZJZ, which promoters of disinformation hastened to present as some kind of big confession (examples archived here and here).
“We were hoping that when the vaccine came, it would be better than this was. Unfortunately, it was a big disappointment, we expected greater protection, but it still protected against more severe forms of the disease and certainly saved many lives, but it was a disappointment”, said Capak.
The quoted claim of the director of HZJZ has no factual basis. The vaccine provided considerable protection against the original strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, for which it was developed, only for the level of protection to decline later with each new mutation. Although the virus has changed over the years, the vaccine still provides some protection, especially against severe disease and death. Also, Capak’s thesis that the vaccine is to blame for the high number of deaths in Croatia does not explain why almost all other members of the European Union have a significantly lower number of deaths in relation to the number of inhabitants; only Hungary and Bulgaria are higher than Croatia. The highly vaccinated Netherlands, Denmark and Finland have the lowest mortality among EU members.
So, what is the real reason for such a high death rate from Covid-19 in Croatia, that is, what HZJZ does not want to talk about? The key part of the answer is unwittingly detected by Branimir Pofuk in his disinformation column, where he writes:
“I can say for myself that I have never believed that the health, life and well-being of all its citizens is suddenly an absolute priority for countries in general, and ours in particular. I am deeply convinced that many, if not all, and especially our own country which is corrupt to the core, are simply incapable of such a thing. The well-being of all citizens goes against the principles that, if not by laws, then certainly by decades of criminal practice, are embedded in the very foundations of that state. The same applies to global pharmaceutical companies, whose own profit is the most sacred rule, always more important than people’s health. If you want to know, many examples and judgments of world courts testify to this”.
The Vecernji list columnist is, therefore, one of the many citizens who do not trust the institutions of the Croatian state, as well as pharmaceutical companies. There is no doubt that there are objective reasons for such mistrust.
Pharmaceutical companies, as Pofuk correctly notes, have a long history of amoral and corrupt activity, which Faktograf has already written about. The same applies to the Croatian state, which has gambled away the trust of citizens over the past three decades with a series of documented examples of corruption, clientelism, incompetence and negligence.
This pattern of governance continued during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) first privatized the management of the response to the epidemic, so that key decisions were not made by independent experts, but exclusively by HDZ party card holders. Accordingly, the decisions made were mostly non-transparent and unclearly explained (which we wrote about at the height of the pandemic), and the criteria for deciding what is allowed and what is prohibited changed depending on the political needs of the ruling party.
Widespread corruption does not contribute to citizens’ trust in state institutions either, which has not bypassed state spending related to the Covid-19 epidemic either. Investigative journalists thus exposed the dubious multimillion-dollar deals that the company owned by a friend of Minister Beros received from the Ministry of Health, as well as the affair with falsified antigenic Covid tests, the resale of which made the son of a former HDZ member of parliament very rich. Both cases are being investigated by USKOK.
At the same time, numerous studies have been conducted in recent years that prove that trust in institutions is perhaps the most important factor in a successful epidemic response (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Countries where citizens trust public institutions are more successful in limiting the spread of the virus and have significantly lower mortality rates than countries where trust in institutions is low.
If they do not trust public institutions, citizens will more easily believe opportunists who use disinformation in attempts to achieve their own political or business interests and therefore refuse vaccination or engage in other forms of risky behaviour during the epidemic. The numbers of hospitalized and dead people show that this is exactly what happened in Croatia during the Covid-19 pandemic.
From all of the above, the conclusion that Telegram’s journalist Jasmin Klaric summarized in the title of his comment: “The discussion about the pandemic is in the interest of public health, but it is not in the interest of the HDZ”.
A fair discussion about the pandemic would, in fact, imply appreciating the lessons learned, admitting mistakes and devising a strategy to train the health system for better management of future public health crises.
However, this would also mean that HDZ members have to admit that they have too often put the party interest above the public interest. It is clear that this will not happen; HDZ does not admit mistakes otherwise, let alone during the pre-election period. In the next two years, parliamentary, European parliamentary, presidential and local elections will be held. It, therefore, suits the ruling party best that their actions during the pandemic be forgotten as soon as possible.