The vaccination campaign against covid-19 is five months old this Thursday with 25,280,864 doses administered so far, with almost 18% of the population immunised, making Spain the sixth European country with the most advanced strategy.
In mid-April, the report of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) placed Spain behind ten countries in terms of immunized population, which shows in recent weeks that significant progress has been made to rank sixth in terms of the administration of the complete vaccination schedule (behind Hungary, Malta, Iceland, Denmark and Lithuania). But in terms of first doses administered, Spain has fallen from 7th to 12th place, according to the latest report of this body dated 16 May, although still within the European average.
There have been ups and downs during the five months of the campaign, however the last two months have been key to the takeoff of the plan with the arrival of new large shipments of vaccines after long weeks of very short supplies, especially due to the failures of AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical company that is now in a lawsuit with the European Commission and has been relegated from the European strategy by Pfizer. In addition, the Spanish campaign has had moments of great uncertainty, including the suspension of vaccination with AstraZeneca due to the detection of cases of rare thromboses and changes in the criteria for its administration.
This is the situation that especially affects essential professionals under 60 years of age vaccinated with a first jab of AstraZeneca, who now have to face a second jab from Pfizer with the confusion that this entails. Janssen also suffered a halt in distribution to study atypical thromboses, with setbacks in the Government’s forecasts of increasing vaccination every week until reaching three million jabs in 7 days.
Although there have been 5 months of campaign with a lack of consistency in criteria and controversies between some autonomous communities and the Ministry, the overall goal of is to immunize 33 million people (70% of the population) by the end of August and move towards a relative normality. The latest Health report indicates that there are currently 17,187,731 people with at least one dose administered, 36.2% of the population, and 8,434,233 immunized with the full vaccine, 17.8% of citizens.
To reach the goal of the Executive there are 25 million citizens still to be immunized and just over three months ahead, in which immunity should be achieved for approximately 8.3 million people each month. The vaccination reports of the Ministry of Health show that in the last month, that is, from April 26 to May 26, just over 4.3 million people have been fully immunized, and so far, this has been the period in which it has accelerated the most.
What does seem manageable is to reach 70% of the population vaccinated by end of August with at least one dose and, therefore, with some defence to protect against Coronavirus, a figure that could be far exceeded with the current rate of vaccinations. Although the month of April marked the launch of vaccination in Spain – more than 8 million doses administered – it was not until the first week of May when the record weekly figure of 2.7 million jabs was reached, a number that, for the moment, has not been surpassed again.