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At stake is a news story advanced by the weekly Expresso, which unveils a proposal from the Directorate General of Health so that the elderly are the last group to be vaccinated.
The Ministry of Health has just issued a statement in which it clarifies that “the information made public” about the vaccination plan, which put the oldest at the end of the priority list “, is included in a purely technical document and is partial and out of date. ” The guardianship also indicates that “the vaccination strategy against covid-19, in preparation by the General Directorate of Health, has not yet been discussed with the Ministry of Health or politically validated.”
However, the prime minister rejected the possibility that all those older than 75 years without serious illnesses did not have priority access to vaccines against covid-19, according to the newspaper “Público” in this morning edition of Friday.
“It is not allowed to give up protecting life due to age. Lives do not have an expiration date,” António Costa said on Twitter. “There are technical criteria that can never be accepted by politicians.”
It is a first draft of the vaccination plan against covid-19 allegedly presented by the General Directorate of Health (DGS) that did not go down well with experts. In it, the oldest, the group most affected by the mortality of the pandemic, is at the bottom of the list of priorities.
The DGS vaccination draft, presented by Graça Freitas, leaves people over 65 at the end of the priority group for vaccination against covid-19. The proposal was presented by the director of the DGS, to a group of 22 experts, and will have caused outrage, reports this Friday the edition of the newspaper “Expresso”.
According to the weekly, there are five priority groups in the document for vaccination against covid-19. First, health professionals, then home-based workers. Third, the population aged 50 to 59 years with risk factors, such as chronically ill, and fourth, the Portuguese aged 60 to 64 years without comorbidities.
At the bottom of the priority list, write “Expresso”, there is the group of people over 65 years. After these five groups, the rest of the Portuguese population follows, in an indefinite order.
The newspaper “Público”, which claims to have access to the conclusions of the working group, said that “people between 50 and 75 years old with serious illnesses, such as heart, respiratory and kidney failure, employees and users of nursing homes.” The elderly and health professionals involved in direct care should be the first to be vaccinated against covid-19. “
According to this newspaper, “in a second phase there will be 45,000 members of the security and civil protection forces and people between 50 and 75 years old with chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, among others, and there are about three millions “.
According to the SIC, people older than 75 years will be left out of the vaccination plan, for now, since pharmaceutical companies and the European Medicines Agency have not presented enough evidence on the effectiveness of the vaccine in this age group.
Of the 4,209 deaths associated with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, 2,834 (67%) were over 80 years old. The above age group (70-79 years) represents 20% of the total deaths (850 deaths). Together, the elderly groups represent 87% of the total lives lost due to the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2.
The age scale made by DGS does not fit the distribution now revealed by “Expresso”. The age group before the two most penalized, in the organization of the daily communication of results, corresponds to people between 60 and 65 years old, a group with 352 deaths associated with covid-19 (around 9% of the total). That is, 96% of the deaths occurred among people over 60 years of age.
In the draft that the DGS will have presented, this last group is divided in half, incorporating those over 65 years of age to the previous sets, in terms of age, to appear fifth on the list of priorities for vaccination against COVID-19.
Statistically, the three oldest groups represent 11% of the total infected since the beginning of the pandemic. According to data from the DGS bulletin revealed on Thursday, of the 280,394 infected, 13,990 were over 80 years old (4% of the total). In the previous age group, from 70 to 79 years, 8,940 cases have been registered so far, which corresponds to 3% of the accumulated, while in the 60 to 70 age group there are 13,819 infections, 4% of the total .
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