Covid vaccinations to start – continues from p1
Sr Puig explained that the Valencia region expects to receive 600,000 jabs from this first round of supply.
Delivery will be carried out in stages over the coming months by road and air.
The first vaccine against Covid- 19 has to be transported using special refrigeration equipment to keep it at an approximate temperature of - 70° C.
The CSIF union has asked for more details from the health department about the vaccination plan, ‘ which is due to start imminently’.
They lamented on Tuesday that their members have not been briefed on the logistics and protocols.
Sr Illa had stated at the weekend that regional health authorities will ‘ give appointments’ to people to be vaccinated ‘ based on the priority groups established’ in the national vaccination strategy.
President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen stated on Monday: “Today we add an important chapter to a European success story.
“We approved the first safe and effective vaccine against Covid- 19. More vaccines will come soon.
“Doses of the vaccine approved today will be available for all EU countries, at the same time, on the same conditions. The upcoming European vaccination days will also be a great moment of unity. This is a good way to end this difficult year, and to start turning the page on this pandemic. We are all in this together.”
She said they are working on delivery – with the company and Member States – so that the first doses are in situ on December 26 and ‘ the EU vaccination days can start on December 27, 28 and 29.
Deliveries will continue in December and on a steady weekly basis during the following months, she added.
An EC spokesman explained that the BioNTech/ Pfizer vaccine is ‘ based on messenger RNA ( mRNA) technology’.
“This allows cells to manufacture harmless fragments of viral proteins that the human body uses to build an immune response to prevent or fight subsequent, natural infection,” he stated.
“When a person is given the vaccine, their cells will read the genetic instructions and produce fragments of the ‘ spike protein’, a protein on the outer surface of the virus which it uses to enter the body’s cells, to replicate, and cause disease.
“The person’s immune system will then treat this protein as foreign and produce natural defences — antibodies and T cells — against it.”
Co- founder of BioNtech, Ugur Sahin stated this week that he was confident that their vaccine would work against the new strain of coronavirus found in the UK.
“The probability that our vaccine is effective against this new mutation is very high,” he said.
He explained that while they were developing their vaccine, every time there was a large mutation in the virus they were able to observe how it reacted. This allowed them to see that their vaccine was able to combat a ‘ whole series of different variants of the virus’.