the minister of Public healthDaniel Rivera, reported this Monday that of the total vaccines anticovid stored in the country, there is a batch that will expire on March 30.
The minister did not specify the amount of vaccines that make up this lot.
To avoid the loss of the product, the official bets on the house-to-house vaccination system, which, although slower, has proven to be effective.
“We have already established that the house-to-house home visit is slower, more laborious, but up to 135 people are vaccinated per day without a rejection rate”Rivera pointed out, during an interview on the program El Despertador.
The official said that the Government does not contemplate giving monetary incentives so that the population completes its vaccination schedule, but instead appeals to self-care and individual responsibility.
Regarding the possibility of donating the biologicals that are about to expire, the ministry’s special adviser for the COVID-19 response, Dr. Eddy Pérez Then, said when asked: “That has not been considered yet. That has to be evaluated and see the possibilities that it could happen”.
On his side, the Deputy Minister of Collective Health, Dr. Eladio Pérez, called for citizens to continue getting vaccinated because the important thing is to “generate immunity in all population groups.”
“Every drug, every biological, has an expiration date. Now, we are going to do everything possible to carry out all the vaccination processes”, emphasized the deputy minister.
Last Friday the 18th, Minister Rivera announced the total number of vaccines available in the country: 6 million from Sinovac, 3 million from Pfizer and 86 thousand from AstraZeneca.
During the act of celebration of the first anniversary of the establishment of the anticovid vaccination program in the country, the director of the Expanded Immunization Program (EPI), Ada Lucía Vargas, indicated that so far no batch of vaccines has expired and that if it happens they will not apply it, affirming that there is a well-programmed and adequate logistics for the conservation and distribution of the vaccines.
Vargas found that approximately 14,000 children between 5 and 11 years old were inoculated during the first week of vaccination in that age range, values that do not coincide with the almost 55,000 children announced by Minister Rivera.
DR has donated 511,800 vaccines
So far, the Dominican Republic has donated 511,800 vaccinesall from the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, divided into four groups: 101,000 to Honduras; 304,000 to Guatemala; 56,800 to Costa Rica and 50,000 to Jamaica.
Minister Daniel Rivera assured that the warehouses of Public health are full and there is no room to receive the 10 million vaccines AstraZenecahired in October 2020.
“Currently we have nowhere to put them, honestly, our warehouses are full,” said Rivera, admitting that these vaccines they are not in the country. “The only ones AstraZeneca that we have received were for the Covax program, the commitment was that they would arrive in January and they did not arrive”, he said.
