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Marcelo and Costa did not speak at the meeting of health experts with the political elite, nor did they speak in a complicit way during the meeting, contrary to what has happened in other meetings on the state of the pandemic. For the first time, they did not wait for each other to leave, in a coldness indicated by the sources present at the meeting heard by the Observer. “In other meetings andThey were always in the cavaqueira, conferencing, and today nothing“Said a party source. The four and a half hours of the meeting were largely silent. It remains to be seen if the discomfort is between them or with the model of the meeting, which both criticized in the past (so much so that the fortnightly meetings ended up dying out) and that this round they did not escape the usual schedule.
After all, why did the meetings at Infarmed end?
The main stage of this meeting with epidemiologists ended up being occupied by the president of the Assembly of the Republic, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, who raised the tone to question why, in the case of households, “they did not have Learned lessons of the first phase. “Also behind closed doors -according to sources present in this part of the meeting- the General Director of Health, Graça Freitas, admitted that doctors have collected“ millions of data ”in epidemiological surveys, but that this information is not treated, which means that there is a lack of knowledge of the “context” of the infection, but let’s start with the first intervention behind closed doors.
Ferro Rodrigues thought he was speaking in private, but, for organization error, the journalists who attended the meeting in Porto, in a room adjacent to the Auditorium of the Faculty of Medicine, heard that first question, strong and attacking, of the President of the Assembly of the Republic. Ferro would end up making another, in a less critical tone, when asking experts about the model that the United Kingdom follows, in which the concern is not to test asymptomatic patients, but to people with signs of having contracted the disease.
Ferro’s question about housing ended without a direct answer. “Was a little surreal as no one responded, “the source present at the meeting told the Observer. This is because the experts ended up giving only a generic answer, after Bloco, PAN and CDS also expressed their concern about the case of households. The epidemiologists responded to all that the evolution of the pandemic was “very heterogeneous”, that at first they thought that homes would be more controlled environments where the pandemic did not enter, but that it did not happen. The experts ended up saying, according to sources heard by the Observer, that “I don’t know what to do differently“. The only solution is the vaccine.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, for his part, remained silent and left the meeting in silence. “And even showing some irritation“Describes one of those present who says that, contrary to usual, the president did not even joke with the technicians at the farewell and left without saying anything, not even to the president of the government António Costa. “You could tell, even by the way he left and the way he was at the meeting, that he was angry. It was not in your days“.
“And when he did not even intervene, he confirmed this discomfort,” said one of the regular participants in these meetings, who describes this meeting as useless, taking into account that it is only “Descriptive”. “There is no effort by specialists to carry out a scientific analysis that can support the political decision,” she says.
This was precisely one of the points that exasperated the Prime Minister in one of the Infarmed meetings (the penultimate). This time, António Costa spoke at the entrance to the journalists, but did not say anything at the exit and, like the President of the Republic, he did not make any intervention or questions during the closed-door meeting.
And this is when the country is a week away from re-entering contingency status, with a worsening of containment measures in the week of the beginning of the school year. At the meeting, no plans for the future were made, only what happened so far was analyzed, talking about some examples in the world, that is, in relation to going back to school.
Also behind closed doors, the Director General of Health spoke to say that the vaccine is a priority and also had no problems in identifying priority groups at the time of applying the vaccine: IPSS employees, health professionals and risk groups. But Graça Freitas also admitted that, although they collect a lot of data in the epidemiological surveys that they do with patients, that information is not treated.
“There are millions of data” that DGS has not been able to attend, Graça Freitas complained according to various sources who attended the meeting. She did not assume the reasons why this happened, but the idea remained that there is no means to extract this data and work on it. The information would allow us to better understand in what context the infection occurs, but it ends up not being used or studied by the entity.
From BE, he had already heard, for example, much dissatisfaction with the characterization of data that the party considers “is still poor”, limiting itself only to the sex and ages of the people, without distinguishing the context in which the contagion occurs, if it is with the family, if it is at work, as deputy Moisés Ferreira complained during the meeting.
Even so, those who participated in the meeting learned from public health specialist Henrique Barros that a study on contagion contexts and try to understand who are the most vulnerable. The work should only be ready in three weeks, the expert revealed in the private meeting.
As for the vaccine, it was also a concern of Chega’s leader, André Ventura, who stressed that the European Union invests a lot in the vaccine, but is being overtaken by other powers. He even recalled that Russian President Vladimir Putin was so confident about a vaccine that he had already administered it to his daughter. But the deputy also questioned the safety of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford. – that Portugal has already ordered 6.9 million doses – and specialistss, this time from Infarmed, reviewed the long validation process to ensure that they would never go to market without this certainty.
The government moved the Infarmed meetings to PDF format. The opposition says it is little
André Ventura also said that he understood from the initial presentation made by the different specialists that the students would not start all the classes at the same time, but then it was clarified that what it is that is defended is that the solution can pass classes at different times, with alternate formats (between face-to-face and videoconferencing) to reduce the size of the classes and also that the classrooms are not shared.
He was not the only one who spoke about schools, with PAN deputy Bebiana Cunha also raising this issue and calling for concrete measures to be applied in schools, after experts pointed out the need to reduce contacts by 50%. But it was forwarded so it has already been released by DGEST and DGS.
The opposition leader, Rui Rio, did not ask any questions either, although – unlike Costa and Marcelo – at the end of the meeting he made statements to journalists. In fact, there was no one from PSD who questioned the experts this time during the space available for these interventions.
Infarmed did not go to Porto, as the Prime Minister once promised (in a long and tumultuous process), but the famous meetings of this pandemic – known as “Infarmed Meetings” – ended up going up to Invicta, at least for now. As none of the main political leaders made any intervention to end the meeting, the participants did not know when it is estimated that there will be a meeting of this nature again since the old fortnightly meetings ended. And, contrary to usual, no date was set for an upcoming meeting.
