More than one in every four covid-19 vaccines, out of the total 43,484,000 received in Portugal, were donated or resold to other countries, the head of the Health Ministry Support Coordination Nucleus revealed today.
According to data advanced by Colonel Carlos Penha Gonçalves in the parliamentary commission on Health, Portugal received until Tuesday 43,484,000 vaccines, 27,075,000 vaccines were administered, and more than 10 million were donated or resold by different mechanisms to other countries.
Citing data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Colonel Penha Gonçalves stressed that Portugal is the European country with the most doses administered per 100 inhabitants (275), followed by Denmark, Ireland, and Belgium, which administered 257 doses per 100 inhabitants.
“It’s a big difference and I would say it’s a good measure of the effectiveness of the process,” he said, noting that, according to ECDC data, Portugal is not even among the countries that received the most vaccines per 100 inhabitants through the centralized purchasing process conducted by the European Commission.
In first place is Austria, with 583 doses per 100 inhabitants, followed by Latvia, with 484, and Spain, with 444.
Portugal appears in 11th place, with 344 doses per 100 inhabitants, said Penha Gonçalves in the Health Commission, where he was heard at the request of the PS “on the status of the ongoing vaccination process, particularly on the contribution of this process to the number of preventable deaths and on strategies to ensure the success of vaccination in the future.
When questioned by the deputy from Chega Pedro Frazão about the 3.5 million vaccines against covid-19 that were unusable because they had passed their expiration date, the responsible explained that the vaccines are used according to the technical and scientific parameters that guide their use, and there are constraints of this order that “determine how the vaccines are used and sometimes this has an impact in exceeding the expiration date.
Making an analysis of the current situation, Colonel Penha Gonçalves stated that the authorities are “vaccinating at a very low rate”, and the process is being done in the health centers.
“We have 700 vaccination points and a capacity of 70,000 vaccines per week, so we are right in between campaign phases,” he said, pointing out that the vaccination campaign has a device of 300 to 400 vaccination points, with a capacity to administer about 100,000 vaccines per day.
“What we knew as the vaccination device for mass vaccination has been dismantled, and all vaccination has moved back to primary health care,” he commented, adding that the scheduling mechanism that is being used is local scheduling.
Penha Gonçalves also said that the authorities continue “to monitor everything that is going on”, but referred that the mechanism that existed, of weekly and sometimes bi-weekly contact with all the agents that were operating, is not justified at this time.
“And so as long as there is no justification in the preparation of the next campaign, we will not resume that contact, but as soon as it is necessary, of course all those mechanisms will be reactivated,” he assured.
