Alexandru Rafila

A fire at a fueling station in Romania caused an explosion that killed at least one person and injured at least eight others Saturday, prompting an evacuation of the immediate area, authorities said.

A second explosion at the station injured at least 26 firefighters, emergency officials said.

"The staff deficit [because of the employment freeze] poses a huge problem. We cannot cover the extra hours," one of the protesters told the G4Media.ro news website.

Romanian healthcare workers are protest in front of the government bundling in Bucharest. Photo: Health Solidarity Federation Romania/Facebook 

Moldova has received a batch of over a million potassium iodide pills from Romania to help in the event of a nuclear accident, in the context of the fighting in Ukraine at the Zaporizhzhia atomic power plant.

Romania's Health Ministry has delayed the mass distribution of iodine pills to the population until mid-April, after many family doctors said they would refuse to distribute them.

PSD MP Alexandru Rafila said on Friday that the emergency ordinance transferring a number of hospital beds from the public to the private system will have the effect of reducing funding for public hospitals, but also the establishment of a co-payment that many cannot afford.

Bucharest Prefect Alin Stoica on Wednesday stated that the target of five million people vaccinated by June 1 is "difficult to reach, but not impossible." "The target is, let's say, difficult to reach, but not impossible. (...) I do not have an expected date. For now, the target is five million on June 1.

Social Democrat deputy, doctor Alexandru Rafila, said today that in order to hold realistic hopes to return to normal at the end of September, Romania needs to rapidly increase the vaccination pace from 50,000 to 100,000 doses daily, pointing out that in terms of the vaccine rollout performance, Romania has slipped from the 3rd to the 19th position among EU countries.

The PSD (Social Democratic Party) will use all domestic and international legal levers to defend the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, so that it is not transformed into a new normative act of the Government through which to allocate funds only to certain communities in the country, Social Democrat leader Marcel Ciolacu said on Friday, after the meeting of the National Standing Bureau of t

Social Democrat MP, doctor Alexandru Rafila, said that in his opinion, the transfer abroad of the severely burned patient who died today in Belgium was "sluggish". "I consider it was a sluggish transfer, because if this had been a first, we could of course have found some excuses.

Social Democratic Party (PSD) MP Alexandru Rafila said on Monday that the Social Democrats support the COVID 19 vaccination campaign, but there are some worrying elements, including the implementation and operation of the IT platform.