Why aren’t all the leftover COVID vaccines sent to countries with fewer resources? | Chain BE

Madrid

On December 26, 2020, the first vaccines to fight against Covid-19 arrived in Spain. Months later, the Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, exemplified the vaccination rate with a phrase: “it goes like a shot.” Since then, more than two years have passed and almost 104 million doses have been administered in Spain, which means that 93% of the population over 12 years of age have the full regimen on. This has caused the vaccination rate to drop, the number of vaccines we have stored to increase, and nearly 14 million doses have expired at the moment.

According to experts we have consulted, in emergency situations between 5 and 10% of the total dose is usually lost. To prevent this from continuing to happen, it has been proposed to reduce the rate and amount of vaccines that continue to reach us. To this end, according to statements offered by the Ministry of Health to Cadena SER, “Spain maintains a firm position together with the European Union to renegotiate existing contracts with laboratories.” Precisely, in Europe it has been signed that doses continue to arrive until the end of this year, and the central government has allocated more than 1,100 million euros for this in the budgets of this 2023.

“It hurts us deeply that while there are countries that do not receive vaccines, they expire in rich countries,” says Amós García Rojas, Member of the Standing Committee for Europe of the World Health Organization. And from there the question arises: why don’t countries with fewer resources use these vaccines? First, because they cannot be sent vaccines that are going to expire in a short time. “The infrastructure of poor countries also makes it difficult for them to manage them from one day to the next. That is not the scenario, such a process requires a lot of time,” explains García Rojas.

And in the event that rich countries plan this donation of vaccines in advance, the second problem is that they would also have to send them financial aid to cover the costs that arise from a vaccination campaign, as Miriam Alía, head of vaccines and response to epidemics from Doctors Without Borders: “you can have vaccines, but not vaccinated people, because you don’t have transportation, or the cold chain, or the salary for the staff, or the way to get to vaccinate them.”

This has happened in countries like the Congo where a million and a half vaccines arrived, for a population of about 6 million inhabitants, and only 6% of the population has sufficient minimum immunity. “The doses arrived and when he saw that he was not capable of vaccinating, he had to transport them and pay for them to other neighboring countries,” says Alía.

It has also happened in areas such as Burundi, which only has 1% vaccinated, Haiti, 2, or Cameroon, 5%. There, this has been coupled with a certain rejection of the population due to misinformation and that the covid is not the only existing pandemic, points out the member of Doctors Without Borders: “in many of these countries, in the last two years there have been measles epidemics , cholera, Ebola, you have to choose where you dedicate the resources”. And another important factor is that vaccines have arrived in poor countries when there were already plenty of them in the rich. That is to say, when the cases of covid, also in their areas, were already on the decline.