Last Tuesday the Public Health Commission agreed to inoculate the third dose of Pfizer to the 6.8 million residents in Spain who are over 70 years old and who had already been punctured with the full schedule, as long as they have elapsed after at least six months since your last covid injection.
That agreement between the Ministry of Health and the communities was anything but a surprise. And it is that the department directed by Carolina Darias had already made it clear since the end of last spring in different informal meetings with the communities that its intention was to embark on a new campaign to reinforce the entire general population as soon as the ordinary one ended.
In any case, by then the doubts that Spain, one of the EU countries that had most pressured Brussels for additional purchases of prophylaxis from Pfizer, was going to revaccinate on a massive scale and that it was going to be precisely with that brand , they were minimal. At the beginning of May, the European Commission had signed a contract with the pharmaceutical giant for the supply of 900 million doses for the entire EU in the period 2021-2023, with a purchase option for another equivalent amount up to 1.8 billion euros. injectables.
Or what is the same: Health, for five months, had guaranteed, according to the calculations of officials of the Public Health Commission, the reception in the next two years of more than 90 million injectables (of that total amount It would be necessary to discount a small game that was advanced in spring, they specify from the commission). Those 90 million doses from Pfizer, to which a similar amount could be added if Brussels agrees, would be enough for two full revaccination campaigns.
Those were the calculations that Darias had in mind. But on July 23, he caused stupor among his collaborators when in a radio interview he had a slip and assured that “everything seems to indicate that we will have to put a third dose”, while taking for granted that this memory would be annual and that it would be from a messenger RNA prophylaxis like Pfizer. The minister’s announcement came long before the pharmaceutical company formally requested authorization from international regulators to market its third dose, but nevertheless it did coincide with the multinational’s media campaign on the need for that new puncture.
Health, and despite the fact that according to many experts there is still no evidence of the need for this ‘booster’, it had already revealed in internal documents prior to the approval of the European Medicines Agency, on Monday, that it did not contemplate any other option other than the revaccination. On September 16, in an internal report of the Public Health Commission – in which the third prick was given the green light to people with very high-risk immunosuppressive treatments and residents in centers for the elderly – the ministry bluntly assured that ” there is evidence in countries in our environment of loss of effectiveness conferred by a complete schedule of vaccines against covid over time, especially in older people ”.
Monday’s decision by the EMA to authorize the puncture for anyone over 18 years of age, going much further than the United Kingdom or the United States, where it is still restricted to the oldest groups, did not surprise in Health, where they knew from weeks ago the regulator was going to end up giving his arm to twist.
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