Pavel Sehnal, the billionaire and chairman of the Civic Democratic Alliance, received a coronavirus vaccine at the beginning of the week at the Bulovka Hospital in Prague, despite not currently being eligible for one. According to the hospital director, Jan Kvaček, Sehnal pretended to be a paramedic in order to be vaccinated. The police are investigating the incident.
Sehnal justified jumping the vaccination queue to Seznam Zprávy by saying that, as the SPGroup holding owner, which owns the private dental clinic Bulovka Dental Clinic, he is in contact with medical staff. He was allegedly asked to be vaccinated by his colleagues, dentists.
However, the hospital director said he had repeatedly told Sehnal that he should not be vaccinated. “I explicitly told him that he could not be vaccinated because he is not a paramedic,” Kvaček said on the website. According to him, Sehnal got the vaccine in Bulovka by having his clinic issue a certificate that he was a paramedic.
According to his information, fifty-six-year-old Sehnal defends himself by saying that although he is not a doctor, “from 1 March, this also applies to medical staff, including receptionists and directors”. He noted that this exception was communicated to him by his medical staff.
In addition to health professionals, seniors over the age of 70 or teachers are preferentially vaccinated. Vaccination is also available to clients and social workers, critical infrastructure workers such as firefighters, police, emergency services or energy professionals, and medics and volunteers.
He found his financial group SPGroup and his companies include, among others, the exhibition center in Letňany, Prague, the aqua park and hotel in Prague Čestlice or the Slavia insurance company.
Sehnal recently became known to the public as the owner of the Letňany Exhibition Center, where a reserve hospital was established last October due to the deteriorating situation in medical facilities in the autumn. In the end, it was not used. The Ministry of Health terminated the lease of space for the backup hospital on 19 February. The reason was financial demands. According to the Minister of Health Jan Blatný, the decision to cancel was also since the staff was preferentially sent to existing hospitals. The Bulovka University Hospital, which included the facility, estimated the cost of rent, energy, and other services at almost 100 million crowns.