Illa: "We will buy more vaccines than we need, we want to be safe"

The Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, vehemently defended this Friday in Barcelona the medical vaccination strategy to combat the covid, and has censured with an unusual harshness in him the sectors that deny or oppose the administration of those doses.

“There is and will continue to be a lot of noise with vaccines.

If someone wants to continue questioning that the Earth is not flat or that man has reached the Moon, let them do so, but anti-scientific attitudes are intolerable because they lie.

Vaccines save lives, it is more than proven ”, said Illa during his speech at the XXV edition of the S'Agaró (Girona) Economy Conference jointly organized by the Olof Palme International Foundation and the Spanish Chamber of Commerce, and which are being held in Barcelona this year due to the pandemic's mobility restrictions.

"Vaccination is nothing new in Spain, every year 10 million people are vaccinated", recalled the Minister of Health, who has also claimed the creation of a vaccination registry throughout Spain to monitor and evaluate each case .

• Illa expects to receive doses of the Pfizer vaccine for 10 million people by early 2021

• Spain begins preparations for record vaccination

At another point, Illa has announced that the Government will buy more vaccines than necessary.

"We want to be safe," he said, and specified that the remaining doses will be donated to other countries "in an exercise of solidarity."

The criteria that will be followed to vaccinate the population and in the distribution between all the territories are still being debated with the scientific community and the autonomies, but it has been clarified that they will be the same throughout Spain and surely throughout Europe.

"In the same way that happens with the flu vaccination campaign, the Government will rely on the autonomous communities to administer the covid vaccine," said Illa, who has been "impressed" by the coordinated strategy of the European Union, capable of putting 27 countries in agreement to negotiate contracts with pharmaceutical companies.

In this sense, he recalled that the EU bought seven vaccines and that it has already closed four contracts with the companies that will produce them.

"The intention is not to sacrifice safety or efficacy, and that is why they have bought a set of vaccines, because there is no certainty as to which will be the most effective."

When it comes to listing the "lessons" that the pandemic has left, Illa has considered that it was very successful to carry out the seroprevalence study carried out in Spain and that it is "unprecedented worldwide", in his words.

The consequence of all this is that at the beginning of the pandemic only 10% of cases were detected and now the percentage exceeds 70%.

He has also assured that it is necessary to strengthen the national health system, as well as "to enhance what has to do with public health and prevention."

In his opinion, the covid-19 also leaves “a cure of humility with this arrogant West”.

For the minister, the pandemic "has challenged us" and called for "reviewing the excessive individualism of Western society", because it has meant "an exercise of wanted or forced solidarity."

"If everyone said they are not going to be vaccinated, we would not get out of this," he has settled.

Illa, who is the organizing secretary of the PSC, has been introduced by the party's first secretary, Miquel Iceta, who has confessed that he predicted a political future "in many places", but not in the Ministry of Health.

For this reason, "I was convinced that he would not fail when the pandemic arrived and my admiration for him has not stopped growing since then," said Iceta.