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Health will allocate the single-dose Janssen vaccine to people aged 70 to 79 years

2021-04-12T13:02:04.039Z


Only 13.3% of this age group have received at least one dose, while 22.3% between 60 and 69 years have already been immunized


The Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, announced this Monday that the first Janssen vaccines will be injected into people between 70 and 79 years old.

The reception of the first vials of this drug is a key step in the vaccination strategy of Spain (and of the entire European Union), since it is the first immunization of a single dose, which allows to accelerate the population volume fully protected against coronavirus.

The minister has ensured that the first vials from Janssen (a pharmaceutical subsidiary of the American company Johnson & Johnson) will arrive in Spain "early on Wednesday morning."

According to the latest report from the Ministry of Health, 13.3% of the population between 70 and 79 years old has received at least one dose of one of the vaccines.

It is a paradoxical situation: immunization in the 60 to 69 age group is much higher (22.3%), although the coronavirus has a greater risk of serious sequelae the older the patient is.

This circumstance occurs because the 65 to 79-year-old range has been in a no-man's-land for weeks: those over 80 were the priority group with the Pfizer doses (91.4% have received at least one dose) and the younger of 65 were the target group with the AstraZeneca drug.

  • The 'sandwich' generation of the vaccine in Spain: those of 70 are left waiting

  • Janssen vaccine: this is the drug that comes and immunizes in a single prick

The latest update of the vaccination plan, on March 30, specified that the administration of Janssen's vaccine would follow age criteria: it will be administered to the oldest and this will decrease as more people are immunized.

With more than nine out of 10 elderly people over 80 years of age with the first dose, this drug had to be destined for the next group, that of the septuagenarians.

The vaccines that are being administered so far in Spain (Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca) require two doses with several weeks of waiting between each puncture.

Immunization with a single injection of Janssen will begin with the 300,000 doses that will arrive in Spain in the next few days, according to the minister detailed last week.

The European Commission signed a contract to receive up to 400 million doses, of which Spain corresponds to around 10.47% (about 42 million).

Of these, the first five million will arrive during the second quarter of the year, according to Darias.

The Minister of Health, Carolina Darias (center), this Monday, accompanied by the Minister of Health of the Canary Islands, Blas Trujillo (third from the left), at the unloading at the Gran Canaria airport of a new shipment from Pfizer of vaccines against the covid-19 Elvira Urquijo A. / EFE

The use of this vaccine in the European Union was endorsed on March 11 by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The drug is 67% effective, as demonstrated in a clinical trial conducted with 44,000 people over 18 years of age in the United States, South Africa and Latin America.

After two weeks, there was a 67% reduction in the number of symptomatic COVID cases in subjects who had received the drug compared to those who had received the placebo.

It is a traditional type vaccine, such as AstraZeneca's, in which a virus is inoculated that incorporates a SARS-CoV-2 gene, which causes covid-19, and thus prepares the immune system to repel future infections.

Those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are based on the technology known as messenger RNA, which places this molecule in cells with the genetic instructions necessary to generate natural defenses against disease.

What about the second dose of AstraZeneca

Asked about the possibility of administering the second dose of AstraZeneca to candidates under 60 years of age who have already received the first with informed consent (after its use was limited due to very infrequent thrombus episodes in the younger population, against the recommendation of the European Medicines Agency), the minister said that "all possible scenarios" are still being examined and it will be decided by virtue of what "the scientific evidence" indicates.

“Calm down, there is time.

We will make known the best of the decisions for those cases of second dose with AstraZeneca ”, has indicated.

There are still several weeks left for those who received the first dose of this drug to get a second prick, since there is a 12-week wait between each injection.

Health assesses the possibility that the second dose administered is of another drug, of AstraZeneca or that this second administration does not exist.

The minister stressed that during the second quarter of the year Spain expects to receive, if the commitments signed with suppliers are met, 38 million doses of different vaccines, almost four times more than the 10 million delivered in the first.

One of the main suppliers, he has detailed, will be Pfizer, which is committed to providing Spain with 4.8 million doses in April alone, at a rate of 1.2 million a week.

All this, he added, will allow "to accelerate the rate of vaccination", with which the Government maintains its goal of having vaccinated 70% of the target population (over 16 years) "before the end of August."

“Vaccines are safe, they are effective and they save lives.

We are verifying this with facts that are in sight: for example, in nursing homes, where fatality has dropped to practically the same [rate] of those who are not in nursing homes.

Or also with other groups that are vaccinated, such as first-line health workers ”, he remarked.

Source: elparis

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