AstraZeneca vaccine, uses only one dose in 10. And the company halves the supply

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Israel, which has already vaccinated half the population, but England, with carpet injections, are also far away. Italy, after an initial sprint in the first phase, that of administrations to doctors and nurses in 300 hospitals, now at the dawn of mass vaccinations is slowing down and, in fact, after leading the EU ranking in the In the first weeks of January, the number of doses administered per 100 inhabitants is now behind Poland, Slovakia, Spain, France and Germany. The fault is not only the cuts in the deliveries of the companies, a fact that affects all European countries and that on Tuesday 23 February saw a new sharp fall in roof tiles: according to EU sources, AstraZeneca would cut the supplies to the EU in the second quarter, bringing doses from 180 million to 90.

The great chaos of regional plans

In reality, the problem is also in the organizational difficulties of the Regions that, to vaccinate outside the hospitals – more than 80, teachers, school personnel and law enforcement agencies – are too slow with territories already ahead and others that start too late among others. with a chaos effect generated by the fact that the rules about reservations and delivery points are usually very different from one Region to another. And so, for the moment, more than one in four doses (30%) remains in the refrigerators, given that of the 5.2 million doses available, the administrations are almost 3.7 million: therefore, 1.5 Millions of doses are unused, figures too high and not justified by the need to reserve the bottles for second administrations. With huge regional differences: if the Aosta Valley has administered more than 90% of the available doses, Calabria, Sardinia and Liguria leave almost half unused.

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AstraZeneca, slow progress

But the most obvious delay is that of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which as of Tuesday, February 23 – after the long-awaited circular from the Ministry of Health – is not only usable for children under 55 but up to 65 years. Here the “waste” is much greater: so far only one in ten doses has been used. The commissioner structure led by Arcuri has in fact delivered one million 48 thousand doses, but those administered are less than a tenth. The serum produced by the Anglo-Swedish company has been prioritized for the use of vaccines from the most exposed occupational categories, but according to Tuesday’s data, very few vaccinated with the first dose are: so far only 51 thousand vaccinated with the first dose . of the school personnel and 33 thousand those belonging to the armed forces. Just over 80,000 doses are used, to which a few thousand more must be added for vaccines for private doctors under 55 years of age.

Too many models, little organization

One weight of the sharp slowdown is that, after having implemented a fairly generic national vaccine plan, implementation has passed to the Regions that are giving rise to 21 regional plans. With different rules and different schedules: there are those, for example, who are very advanced in the vaccination of those over 80 – such as Lazio, which has already reached 20% of the elderly – and those who leave alone these days. Not to mention the administrations: there are those over 80 who vaccinate them in hospitals and those of family doctors, who will now be crucial in the phase of mass immunizations. However, someone refuses to vaccinate in his study asking for the intervention of the ASL but thus “exposing” the first 65-year-old patients who, for example, in Lazio as of March 1, will not know where to go to the vaccination field.