Vietnam’s highest legislative body National Assembly on July 28 passed a resolution allowing the government and the prime minister to apply a “special mechanism” in applying measures not yet prescribed by law or different from those of current law to deal with COVID-19 pandemic.
Accordingly, the National Assembly assigns the Government and the Prime Minister to decide to apply measures to restrict some vehicles, ask people not to leave their residences for a certain period of time, in some areas and localities; organize forces to ensure security, social order and safety in pandemic-affected areas; special measures on communication and use of communication means and other measures that can be applied in a state of emergency to promptly prevent the spread of the disease, according to Thanh Nien.
In addition, the government and prime minister are also allowed to take “outside of the law” measures to “meet urgent requirements” of pandemic prevention and control, such as special features in licensing, circulation registration and production, procurement of drugs, medical equipment, chemicals and investment in facilities; Procurement in a quantity higher than the actual demand to prevent the pandemic from becoming complicated…
At the meeting, the National Assembly of Vietnam also decided to transfer VND1,237 billion ($52.6 million) of funding for the 2020 “Medical career” of the Ministry of Health to buy vaccines, prioritize the use of the state budget and mobilize all other legal measures for the prevention and control of the COVID-19 epidemic, Tuoi Tre added.
In addition to the requirement to ensure social security and issues of employment and life for the people, the Vietnamese parliament also requires the government to ensure national defense, security, political stability, not to be passive or unexpectedly in all situations, “actively fight against and refute distorting and hostile claims, strictly control bad, toxic, and untrue information and strictly handle violations in prevention and control COVID-19 pandemic,” Thanh Nien reported.
It is reported that the measures agreed by the National Assembly for the government and the Prime Minister to implement are valid until the end of 2022.
The meeting of the National Assembly took place at a time when Vietnam was facing the biggest outbreak ever, causing the total number of people infected with COVID-19 to skyrocket to 120,766 people, of which nearly 117,000 were infected during the fourth outbreak. More than half of Vietnam’s provinces are under lockdown while only about 450,000 people are fully vaccinated with the COVID-19 vaccine out of a total of 98 million people in Vietnam.
There are conflicting numbers of deaths. The bulletin of the Ministry of Health on the epidemic situation as of the evening of July 28 said that 630 people had died from the epidemic across the country, while a bulletin of Tuoi Tre newspaper on the same day said that in Ho Chi Minh City alone, Ho Chi Minh City has 815 deaths from COVID-19.
Other news said that because of the strong outbreak, the session of the National Assembly of Vietnam had to be cut short by 3 days, closing on July 28 instead of July 31 as originally planned.
Thoibao.de (Translated)
