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At this time, Portugal will not register people who refuse to be vaccinated against covid-19, the general director of Health said on Tuesday, despite underlining the “enormous adherence” to the vaccination process in these first days.
At a press conference on the evolution of the pandemic, Graça Freitas admitted that the start of vaccination is “a very complex movement” that will occur simultaneously in the member states of the European Union and moved the Portuguese position away from the system adopted in Spain. who will keep a record with the names of the people who refuse to receive the vaccine.
“There are things that can evolve over time, but to date, this vaccine is being considered the same as the others. Despite being new, having been made in record time and having a different technology, it has not stopped passing through the European Medicines Agency and is not an experimental medicine ”, he stressed.
The Director General of Health reiterated that vaccination “is a voluntary and highly encouraged act”, but that the fact that there is a pandemic has not changed the protocol so far and that “this vaccine will follow the same procedures as the others.”
“If a person does not show up, they are not vaccinated, but it is not recorded that they did not want to,” added Graça Freitas, about a process that in this first phase is focused only on health professionals, having already reached more than 7,500 in first two days.
Regarding the cases of covid-19 among health professionals, the Director General of Health clarified that 16,663 cases have been reported since the beginning of the pandemic, of which some 9,600 are already considered recovered. Still in this regard, he assured that professionals who have already been infected will not be excluded from vaccination.
“All health professionals who have direct contact with patients are eligible candidates for vaccination. We are following a logic of priority and these professionals will not immediately enter the priority, but it is a matter of weeks. Health professionals vaccinated. They will not enter as a priority, but nothing prevents them from being vaccinated and they will be vaccinated ”, he observed.
According to Graça Freitas, the first two days of administration of the covid-19 vaccine “went quite well”, taking into account the involvement of “many entities” in a “mega vaccination operation”, which, in short, “may cover the entire Portuguese population in the future.
Portugal represents at least 6,751 deaths associated with covid-19 in 400,002 confirmed cases of infection, according to the latest bulletin from the Directorate General of Health (DGS).
