The start of vaccination in the Netherlands could have been smoother, says Maarten Tanis, responsible for the vaccination program within the GGD Rotterdam-Rijnmond. He also indicates in an interview in NRC that the GGDs only received an order from the Ministry of Health “at the beginning of December” to help with vaccinations immediately.
That happened after the strategy was changed. “First, the strategy was that the vulnerable would be vaccinated by health and safety or institutional doctors,” Tanis says in the newspaper. Because of the refrigeration facilities needed to store Pfizer’s vaccines, that approach proved inconvenient. “That is why the ministry has chosen to first inoculate the care workers at central locations and to give this assignment to the GGD. We now know about three to four weeks of this assignment.”
“That is the reality we are dealing with,” says Tanis. The GGDs assumed their turn would be much later. “We were initially going to start in August with the healthy group up to sixty years old, the last phase of the vaccination campaign. We already took into account that we would have to jump in and wanted to be ready for it by the end of January, the beginning of February. pulled forward. “
Where vaccination has already started in other EU countries, the first injection will be done in the Netherlands on 8 January. Tanis expects to have vaccinated about 15,000 healthcare providers from his region by the end of February. Abroad he sees that mistakes are sometimes made in logistics or dosing. According to him, this can also happen in the Netherlands. “But we prefer to do it carefully than to do things under steam and boiling water that we are not ready for. Then I will take it for myself to start a week later.”
