Starting next Tuesday, 900,000 doses will be distributed to the provinces. Others from Moderna will arrive on February 6.
Bivalent vaccines against Covid-19 arrived in the country. This Tuesday the nationwide distribution of this new stock will begin, which includes both the original Wuhan strain and the newer subvariants (Ómicron, BA.4 and BA.5). Each jurisdiction will decide when they will start to apply.
This Thursday, the Minister of Health, Carla Vizzotti, announced at a press conference the incorporation of the Comirnaty Bivariate Original/Omicron BA.4-5 vaccines from the Pfizer/BioNtech laboratory (for people 12 years of age or older), and the Spikevax vaccine. Bivariate Original/Omicron BA.4-5 from Moderna (for those aged six or older). They are used both to start or complete primary schemes and for the application of booster doses.
The official then specified that, no later than Friday, 1,100,160 doses of Pfizer’s bivalent vaccine would arrive in the country, which finally materialized, sources from the National Ministry of Health confirmed to this newspaper. Of these, 900,000 will be distributed to all provinces starting Tuesday.
Although the Nation has not yet clarified how many bivalent vaccines Pfizer will send to each province, the Government of Salta has already reported that it will receive a batch of more than 28,000 doses, while some 25,900 would arrive in Misiones, according to local media citing Governor Oscar Herrera Ahuad.
On similar occasions, a session of the Federal Health Council (COFESA) has been convened to define the characteristics of the vaccination campaign. However, in the ministry they insist that for now there is no meeting scheduled in this regard and that the application date will be decided by each province, although they hope it will be in the coming weeks. In general, 48 hours pass between when the doses are received and when they begin to be given.
The Moderna bivalent vaccine, meanwhile, will begin to arrive in the country on February 6. Throughout that week, in different shipments, around 3 million doses will arrive, the ministry reported. On February 13, another 1.2 million doses of bivariates from Pfizer will begin to arrive.
During the application, no formulation will be prioritized over another, but the one available at the moment will be given, according to the authorized ages. There will also be no priority by age group.
In the health portfolio, they highlighted that “in the national strategy the vaccines applied so far and the new bivariate vaccines will coexist”, since “all the vaccines against COVID-19 have proven to be safe and effective.”
“You have to make it clear to people, so that expectations are lowered a bit, that it has not yet begun to be distributed and it is not known when it will be applied. This may take time”, highlighted the infectologist Bárbara Broese in dialogue with the channel All News (TN).
What is the bivalent vaccine
A bivalent vaccine protects against two viruses. “In this case, what it does is provide protection against two SARS-Cov-2 viruses that have some differences,” explained the infectious disease specialist Elena Obieta, head of the Infectious Diseases Service at the Boulogne Hospital in San Isidro.
“In the case of this vaccine, it will have immunogens (which are the stimuli that make us make antibodies against the virus) of the Wuhan variant (also called ancestral) and of the Ómicron variant, which is the one that circulated the most, the latter year,” he said.
EMJ
