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Photo by Dado Ruvic (Reuters / Scanpix)
Vaccination against the coronavirus will begin in Lithuania this weekend, as in the whole of the European Union. Doctors will be vaccinated first, but the vaccine is expected to be available to a wider audience soon and the process will accelerate to the point where hundreds of thousands of people will be vaccinated in a few months.
The COVID-19 vaccine, developed by the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech, was approved on Monday by the European Medicines Agency and the European Commission. Its brand is Comirnaty.
The approval of the Moderna vaccine in the European Union should also be considered shortly. Coronavirus vaccines developed by AstraZeneca and at least three other companies are also waiting in line.
In total, the Lithuanian government has reserved around 7.6 million. dosages from six manufacturers. Of these, Pfizer / BioNTech alone accounted for about 1.8 million. dose.
Next year’s budget for the vaccine is 65 million. EUR. If these amounts are not enough, the government is ready to release at least an additional 40 million from its reserve, which will be one and a half times more than this year due to the challenges of the pandemic. EUR.
It will be delivered to the state reserve warehouse.
The Ministry of Health (SAM) announced that the first shipment of vaccine will be delivered to Lithuania this Saturday, December 26. It will be housed in the warehouses of the Health Emergencies Center.
According to the SAM report, “in order to guarantee the secrecy of the place where the state reserve is kept,” the location of these deposits is not disclosed.
On Friday, it was announced that cargo from Belgium, where the Pfizer plant is located, would arrive in Lithuania by land, and police teams would receive it at the border with Poland.
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“The vaccine is already going to Lithuania from Belgium. It is transported by land. We are waiting for its arrival in Lithuania between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. 26 d. When the vaccines approach the Lithuanian border, the safety of the Vaccines will be guaranteed by the police teams, who will accompany them both to the warehouses and to the 5 main hospitals where they will be vaccinated, ”Jurgita Grebenkovienė, chancellor of the Ministry of Social Affairs, told LRT radio.
However, the amount of vaccine transported has not yet been reported. So far it has been announced that the first shipment should contain about 10,000 doses of the vaccine. He said it would be enough to vaccinate a similar number of people.
J. Grebenkovienė states that the second batch of vaccine should arrive in Lithuania on December 31 and “then in January and February, the vaccine batches will be provided regularly, every week”.
Antanas Matulas, chairman of the Seimas Health Affairs Committee, stated that he would have information that the batches of vaccines arriving in Lithuania each week in January would amount to approximately 20,000 doses.
Because the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine must be administered twice per person with an interval of 21 days, although the number of doses delivered will double, some of them will be administered to those who have been vaccinated for the first time. about 10,000 a week. But in just a few weeks, it could grow slowly.
In five clinics at the same time
Arūnas Dulkys, Minister of Health, announced that the vaccination campaign in five clinics in Lithuania will begin at the same time, this Sunday, December 27, at 8 pm in the morning.
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In the Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipėda, Šiauliai and Panevėžys clinics, medical staff will be vaccinated first.
Afterwards, according to A. Dulkys, the nursing staff and residents will be vaccinated. The vaccination process for these two groups is expected in January-February, according to the vaccine delivery schedule.
“The forecast would be that in January we can say that the medical community is vaccinated and we have stronger positions in the first bulwark of the health system,” said the minister.
He said it was already planned how and in what order doctors would be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
A. Dulkys acknowledged that the vaccine developed by Pfizer / BioNTech will be difficult to vaccinate due to its storage, transportation, and packaging characteristics. According to him, a package of this vaccine contains 975 doses that must be consumed over a period of time, so it will be easy to use in large centers, but smaller treatment facilities may have difficulties.
Comirnaty can be stored for half a year in cold temperatures of at least -70 degrees. There are at least some refrigerators in Lithuania that maintain such a low temperature. Each of them contains several thousand doses.
The vaccine can be administered to the vaccination site prior to injection for up to 5 days. stored at 2-8 degrees (so this time can also be stored in a normal refrigerator) or up to 2 hours. at temperatures up to +30 degrees.
The subsequent procedure will be composed of experts
A. Dulkys emphasized that the expert council formed by Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė will decide on the vaccination order of the rest of society, but the exact information will be known only when it is clear what and what quantities of vaccine will arrive in Lithuania. After vaccination of health and social care workers and residents, people over 65 will be able to line up to receive the vaccine. age and chronic diseases.
It is estimated that if at least 10,000 to 20,000 people are vaccinated a week, at least half a million people in Lithuania could be vaccinated by the end of May.
The vaccination of large sectors of the population will be organized by SAM together with the municipalities. The latter plan this campaign differently. For example, vaccination is scheduled in Vilnius polyclinics and the Kaunas City Municipality has decided to vaccinate the public against coronavirus in the Central Post Office building. It is true that Povilas Poderskis, director of the Municipal Administration of the City of Vilnius, does not rule out that “after receiving clearer information from the SAM, the possibility of establishing vaccination centers in the capital will be considered.”
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According to Ieva Bajoriūnienė, a doctor at the Kaunas Clinics of the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, vaccination is not necessary for people with COVID-19 and who have acquired immunity. He acknowledged that some people planning to get vaccinated may have been diagnosed with the disease without even knowing it, but that “no risks or side effects have been seen in clinical trials.”
To date, around 61,000 people have been infected with coronavirus in Lithuania and nearly 64,000 are currently ill.
Surveys show different results
Vaccination against the coronavirus has been carried out in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada for some time. According to preliminary data, about 2 million people have been vaccinated in all these countries as of this Friday. people.
Approximately 70% of the population would need to be vaccinated or already have COVID-19 in order to obtain the so-called “herd immunity.” In the case of Lithuania, this would be approximately 1.9 million. people.
Different polls in Lithuania show different public willingness to participate in the vaccination campaign. One of them showed that two-thirds of the country’s population over the age of 18 plans to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
“The question was asked whether people would agree to be vaccinated with an available and safe vaccine. Specifically, 68% said that it really was like that or rather like that. This means that they plan to get vaccinated, ”said Simonas Krėpšta, adviser to the president.
At that time, according to a survey conducted by Vilmorus on behalf of the LRT, 45% of the country’s population would be vaccinated, 22% would not agree to be vaccinated and a third had not yet decided. There is also no shortage of vaccination skeptics in other Western countries.
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