The Government will approve the coronavirus vaccination plan on Tuesday

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The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has announced that next Tuesday the Council of Ministers will approve the vaccination strategy against the coronavirus, and that he foresees that "a very substantial part of the Spanish population may be vaccinated with all the guarantees throughout of the first semester of 2021 ”.

"Spain will be the first country in the European Union, together with Germany, to have a complete vaccination plan," said Sánchez this Friday in La Rioja, where he presented the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan of the Spanish Economy together with the president of the region, Concha Andreu.

“We have been working on this plan since September.

We are prepared ”, assured the president.

Despite qualifying the horizon as "hopeful", "any euphoria must be compensated by caution," Sánchez has nevertheless requested.

The EU has already signed contracts with the pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca, Sanofi / GSK, Janssen and BioNTech / Pfizer for a total of 1,000 million expandable doses, as explained by the head of the Spanish Government, who also stated that the signature is "imminent" of the contract with the company CureVac and that negotiations with Moderna and Novavax are well advanced, for a total of 400 million additional doses.

Spain will be responsible for 10% of the contracted doses, and it is already "working at full capacity" so that they are "available as soon as possible", Sánchez assured.

The groups that are likely to be vaccinated in the first place will be health workers and the elderly, who are the most vulnerable to covid, as explained a few days ago by the Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, something that also corresponds to the WHO recommended strategy.

Pilar Aparicio, general director of Public Health of the ministry, said this Friday that the vaccination plan “is still being finalized.

The idea is that it be common to all the autonomous communities and coordinated with the European Union ”since, among other things, the purchases will be made jointly“ within the EU initiative in which Spain has participated very actively ”.

In the absence of further specificity, the European Commission established on October 15 general guidelines for vaccination: "All EU members will have access to vaccines for covid-19 at the same time and these will be distributed according to their population.

In the initial moments, the total number of doses will be limited until production accelerates.

Therefore, this communication [the Commission document that provides these guidelines] offers examples - without assuming an order of preference - of the population groups that should have priority access to vaccination in each country: health and care personnel , people over 60, people whose mental health makes them more vulnerable, essential workers, people who cannot maintain a physical distance, other socio-economically disadvantaged groups ”.

The president has reviewed the state strategy with which the second wave is being faced.

“Today we have more instruments than yesterday and we have perfected co-governance.

We have a state strategy with common indicators, common actions and a weekly evaluation of the measures adopted.

We are very aware that we need 2-3 weeks to know what the evolution of these measures is.

With these common instruments, we have been steadily reducing the accumulated incidence for two weeks, ”he said from the Wurth Museum, in the Riojan town of Agoncillo.

Sánchez has pointed out that "the accumulated incidence has been steadily decreasing for two consecutive weeks to 14 days", which has gone from "almost 530 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the first week of November to yesterday of 436 cases.

We are on the right path to bend the curve, fulfilling the ambitious goal we have set for ourselves ”.

"But we are still very high, to return to a cumulative incidence of 25 infections per 100,000 inhabitants in 14 days," he warned, for which he states: "we should not relax at this critical time."

Information about the coronavirus

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