At the end of last week, the cabinet decided on the advice of the Health Council that people under the age of 60 should no longer be injected with AstraZeneca in connection with possible side effects. But a large part of that group simply wants the vaccine.
“We receive daily calls from people who would very much like to be vaccinated with AstraZeneca,” general practitioner Ilona van Nispen tot Pannerden-Moorrees tells EditieNL. “Younger people who fall into a vulnerable group are interested. And people who themselves work in healthcare and come into contact with people with Covid-19 say: please inject me with AstraZeneca.”
Confusion
The GP is also behind puncturing. According to her, the risk is very small. “But the profit is big for all of us. The world can open faster,” she says. “We note the names but there is a lot of confusion. The Health Council has also said that we can vaccinate people under 60 if they want to, but that has not really been confirmed. So there is a lot of chaos.”
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The vaccines that remain as a result will be used as usual if it is up to the doctor. “We are not going to throw them away. I am going to use them for people who want and need them. And then you first look at your list of vulnerable people.”
On the shelf
How many AstraZeneca vaccines are now on the shelf because of the injection stop? According to holiday counter Yorick Bleijenberg, this is unclear. Bleijenberg stops his Twitter account vaccination figures at. “We know that at least 500,000 vaccines were received in the past week. The only question is whether they have been distributed to the GPs, and we do not know how many injections GPs have already administered.”
According to Bleijenberg, this is because the registration systems are not yet properly connected to each other. “We have been stinging for more than ninety days and we still don’t have a good idea of it,” says Bleijenberg. “We simply do not know centrally. That is why the vaccination figures have not been updated by the RIVM in the past two days. A lot of vaccines are simply at the GPs.
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It is difficult to say whether we will survive without the AstraZeneca vaccine. “We also don’t know what will happen with the supply of other vaccines.” Just this afternoon, pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson announced that it would postpone the roll-out of the Janssen corona vaccine in Europe as a precautionary measure due to possible side effects. “It would be better if AstraZeneca could also be fully utilized.”
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