Delivery delays hit jab rollout in Spain
HEALTH authorities in Spain have said they are running out of Covid19 vaccines and will have to postpone giving shots to health workers and nursing home residents due to delays in deliveries by pharmaceutical companies.
Catalonia’s public health chief, Josep Argimon, said that the region will have used up all its available vaccines by tomorrow, when its “refrigerators will be empty”.
Mr Argimon said this will mean that 10,000 people who had received the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine will not be able to get their required second dose as planned 21 days later.
He said “in theory this should not be a problem” because the guidelines approved by the European Union indicate the second dose can be administered 21 to 45 days after the first shot.
But he said: “All these elements add more uncertainty to the vaccination scheme.”
Mr Argimon said Catalonia had
also experienced a delay in receiving the Moderna coronavirus vaccine, the only other vaccine currently approved by the EU, which was supposed to arrive this week but has been pushed back until Monday.
Spain, along with the rest of the EU, has suffered inoculation delays since Pfizer announced two weeks ago that it would have a temporary reduction in deliveries so it could upgrade its plant in Puurs, Belgium.
The EU, however, is pressing all vaccine companies to make sure they carry out their promised vaccine deliveries.
“We believe that the EU and Spain as a member state should take a firm stance that the contracts must be honoured,” Mr Argimon said.
Madrid regional vice president Igancio Aguado also announced that Spain’s capital is stopping new vaccinations in order to use what it has in stock to ensure that those waiting for a second dose do not go without it. Mr Aguado said the current pace of vaccinations will make it impossible to meet the national government’s goal of inoculating 70% of Spain’s 47 million residents by summer.
Spain has administered 95% of the 1.3 million vaccines it has received as part of the EU plan, according to the health ministry. Only 123,000 people have received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
Meanwhile, Astrazeneca has defended itself against claims that it had reneged on contractual commitments with the EU.
The drugmaker’s chief executive Pascal Soriot addressed the dispute for the first time, rejecting the EU’S assertion that the company was failing to honour its commitments to deliver coronavirus vaccines.
He said delivery figures in Astrazeneca’s contract with the EU were targets, not firm commitments, and they could not be met because of problems in rapidly expanding production capacity.
“Our contract is not a contractual commitment,” Mr Soriot said in an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica. “It’s a best effort. Basically we said we’re going to try our best, but we can’t guarantee we’re going to succeed. In fact, getting there, we are a little bit delayed.”
Mr Soriot said Astrazeneca had to reduce deliveries to the EU because plants in Europe had lower-than-expected yields from the biological process used to produce the vaccine.