The Bran Castle in Romania. Credit...Octav Ganea/Inquam Photo, via ReutersThe needles at Bran Castle in the Transylvania region of Romania won’t be drawing blood — instead, they’ll be administering a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Vaccines will be available every weekend in May without an appointment at the castle, which says it is “the only castle in all of Transylvania” that fits the description of Dracula’s castle in the novel about the vampire.
People who get vaccines there will get “free access to the exhibition with medieval torture tools,” the castle said on its Facebook page. But venturing to the castle for the shots and scares wouldn’t be wise for international travelers, as the vaccines are available at the castle only to residents of Romania, Bran Castle’s marketing manager, Alexandru Priscu, told The Associated Press.
Amid concerns in Romania that demand for vaccines is slowing, Mr. Priscu said, “we wanted to show people a different way to get the needle.”
More than 19 percent of people in Romania have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. New daily coronavirus cases there have dropped significantly — around 1,200 each day on average — since spikes in November and March.
The castle joins the many weird and occasionally beautiful places around the world that are doubling as vaccine spots, some for convenience and some hoping to entice people by the location. They include Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, the American Museum of Natural History, on the sand in Miami Beach and a ski resort in Colorado.
— Bryan Pietsch
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/13 ... irus-cases
And here's the link to the castle's facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/BranDraculasCastle/