Vlad the vaccinator: Dracula's castle lures visitors with COVID-19 jabs | Inquirer News

Vlad the vaccinator: Dracula’s castle lures visitors with COVID-19 jabs

/ 02:07 PM May 10, 2021

Vlad the vaccinator: Dracula's castle lures visitors with COVID-19 jabs

Bran Castle towers above Bran commune, in Brasov county, Romania, May 8, 2021. Inquam Photos/George Calin via REUTERS

BUCHAREST — Visitors to Dracula’s castle are more likely to find puncture marks in their arms than their necks this month, after medics set up a COVID-19 vaccination center at the Transylvanian attraction.

Doctors and nurses with fang stickers on their scrubs are offering free Pfizer shots to all-comers at 14th century Bran Castle, which is purported to be an inspiration for the vampire’s towering home in Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula”.

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Castle staff hope the service will bring more people to the site in Romania’s Carpathian mountains, where tourist numbers have plummeted since the start of the pandemic.

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Anyone can turn up without an appointment every weekend in May. They also get free entry to the castle’s exhibit of 52 medieval torture instruments.

“The idea … was to show how people got jabbed 500-600 years ago in Europe,” the castle’s marketing director, Alexandru Priscu, said.

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One of the visitors on Saturday was Fernando Orozco, a 37-year-old renewable energy market developer usually based in Berlin who has been working remotely out of Romania.

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“I was already planning to come to the castle and I just thought it was the two-for-one special,” he said.

The government has said it wants to vaccinate 10 million of its people by September, but a survey released in April by Bratislava-based think tank Globsec showed Romanians were the least inclined to get vaccinated among the EU’s eastern members.

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TAGS: COVID-19, Romania, Transylvania

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