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The team that coordinates the vaccination plan presented the first version of the document to the government today, which will be publicly presented tomorrow. The minister highlights “three uncertainties” about the process, warning “that the clinical results of phase three are not yet known, so the efficacy of the vaccines has not yet been verified by the European Medicines Agency.” Then it is also necessary to know the duration of immunity, as well as the safety of vaccination of children and pregnant women.
For Marta Temido, the assumptions are: the availability of vaccines by pharmaceutical companies; the validation of its viability and safety by the European Medicines Agency; and the delivery of vaccines to each of the European countries at the same time.
There is a “margin of uncertainty” in the process, but the path is being made, says the minister. THE task strength is analyzing the available vaccines, defining the vaccination groups and where the vaccine for covid-19 should be administered. “Now we must realize that the vaccination process will be long. It will not be carried out in a single day, or in a short period,” warns Marta Temido, reinforcing the need to maintain protection measures.
“The vaccines will be administered in the National Health Service (…) for free and optional”, and must be delivered to anyone who has guidelines for taking them. Portugal will buy more than 22 million doses of vaccines against covid-19, representing a cost of 200 million euros, said the Minister of Health.
When asked about the hypothesis that the vaccine is being administered in health centers or in large, less decentralized vaccination centers, Marta Temido only said that it would be through the SNS, pointing out two possible scenarios.
“A first moment in which there will be a context of greater scarcity in access to vaccines and, therefore, in a similar way to what other countries have been planning, will be a more controlled scenario, but then we admit that throughout the year 2021 we will move to a broader scenario with more doses available and also greater expansion of administration points ”, he explained.
Marta Temido intervened this afternoon at the Palácio da Ajuda, in Lisbon, after learning that both the Minister and the Secretaries of State for Health tested negative for SARS-CoV-2, after the announcement that the Director General of Health, Graça Freitas, She is sick with covid-19.
The team responsible for the plan is working with the pharmacists behind the vaccine, to also evaluate the internal logistics of the vaccine, also taking into account the specificity of the autonomous communities, added the Minister of Health on Wednesday.
The discussion about the vaccine against the disease discovered late last year in China grows as advances in solutions are announced. The United Kingdom announced on Wednesday the approval of the vaccine by the Pfizer / BioNTech consortium (United States and Germany), beginning its distribution to risk groups next week. However, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that even the most vulnerable people should only get vaccinated in the spring of 2021, calling for realism.
Speaking to the Observer, the President of the Republic appealed in the same direction, warning that the approval of a vaccine does not represent the immediate end of the pandemic protection measures. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa does not want “illusions” and warns that “vaccinating the Portuguese will take many months.”
Pfizer has already said that it will be able to make the vaccine available in Portugal three days after approval from the European Medicines Agency. The community body is expected to announce a decision on this vaccine on December 29.
Marta Temido has stressed that the vaccination process will be long and that the Portuguese will not be able to “deviate from the regulations” to which they have become accustomed in times of pandemic.
Today’s meeting was also attended by members of the workgroup created to develop the vaccination plan and which is led by the former Secretary of State for Health, Francisco Ramos.
The ministers of State and Presidency, Mariana Vieira da Silva, Health, Internal Administration, Eduardo Cabrita, and National Defense, João Gomes Cravinho, as well as the Prime Minister’s Undersecretary of State, Tiago Antunes, also participated.
Portugal represents at least 4,645 deaths associated with covid-19 in 303,846 confirmed cases of infection, according to the latest bulletin from the Directorate General of Health.
On Tuesday, in an interview with Radio Observador, Prime Minister António Costa announced that on Thursday the national vaccination plan against covid-19 will be presented and rejected that Portugal is lagging behind other countries, considering that the country is “just in time”. António Costa assured that Portugal began to work on this plan practically from the beginning of the pandemic and that it made the maximum order for each batch to which it was entitled, with the logistics plan “underway and in execution.”
Pharmacies are available to integrate the vaccination plan
The organizations representing pharmacies today expressed their willingness to contribute to the vaccination of the Portuguese against covid-19, considering that it is up to the Ministry of Health to “make this option.
“It would be incomprehensible that Portugal, having one of the best pharmacy chains in Europe, with three pharmacists, on average, per pharmacy, with more than 5,000 pharmacists authorized to administer the vaccine, would not use this installed capacity to carry out the plan vaccination. 19 ”, says the president of the Ordem dos Farmacêuticos, the president of the Portuguese Association of Pharmacies and the president of the National Association of Pharmacies.
According to the joint statement, pharmacists are “scientifically prepared to vaccinate” and administer, annually, more than “one million vaccines and injectables” in the country.
For these three entities, pharmacy professionals “lead with absolute competence” the process of distribution and storage of medicines, which, in the case of covid-19 vaccination, implies “special cold and safety conditions, as well as a adequate infrastructure to guarantee administration, in some cases of two doses, in a short period of time ”.
“We must look at what is being done in other countries, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Canada and Australia, which have already integrated or are in the process of integrating community pharmacists into the covid-19 vaccination plan, through of their national pharmacy networks ”, they affirm.
“It depends on who coordinates this operational complex in the Ministry of Health to make this option,” adds the statement signed by Ana Paula Martins, Manuela Pacheco and Paulo Cleto Duarte.
CDS defends a “credible, responsible” plan that “gives security” to the Portuguese
The president of the CDS-PP, Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos, defended today that the national vaccination plan against covid-19, which will be known on Thursday, must be “credible, responsible” and must provide “security” to the Portuguese. In statements to the Lusa agency at the end of a meeting with the Association of Persons with Disabilities of the Armed Forces in Lisbon, the centrist leader began by saying that “the absence of a vaccination plan is the most serious external sign of the confusion of this Government ”.
The António Costa executive “is in a race against time and has not yet been able to do, due to lack of planning and foresight, what our international counterparts, such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Netherlands, have already done. did, ”he said.
“These delays can cost lives, and at this moment we have to demand from the Government a credible, responsible, predictable and security plan for the Portuguese, because none of the responsible countries is at this moment with crossed arms waiting for a global decision from Europe. Only Portugal ”, he stressed.
In the opinion of the president of the CDS-PP, Portugal must be “faster and not repeat the absolute failure of the flu vaccination”.
For this reason, the centrists want to know “exactly and rigorously what this plan consists of, the predictability, safety and priority people who will be the recipients of the vaccines, where the elderly naturally have to figure in the first place.” Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos considered that “it is essential” to understand “the logistical plan for the allocation and administration of vaccines”, as well as to identify “priority target groups”, and insisted that “older people should come first.”
“We are less than a month away, and the CDS demands concrete answers from the Government, because a Portuguese citizen cannot be less than a German, French, Spanish, English citizen, and the truth is that until now we have no answers: how, how much and when we will have vaccines ”, he added.
For the leader of the CDS, it will be “a glaring error, which goes against all the scientific literature and the advice we are hearing from experts” if the elderly are not included in the priority groups to receive the vaccine against covid- 19.
Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos also pointed out that this issue is one more example of the Government’s “not knowing how to manage crises”, since “it has a lot of communication capacity in times of tranquility” but “stinks in adversity”.
