There must be at least six months between the second corona jab and the booster, so older people who received their second jab in July or later will have to wait a little longer. To achieve this, the injection capacity of the GGD will have to increase considerably in the coming weeks. This week the GGD is installing about 200 thousand boosters, next week there should be 350 thousand, and 700 thousand in the following weeks. The GGD hopes for help from a diverse collection of auxiliary troops: hospitals, general practitioners, medical students, MBO students, veterinarians and the Ministry of Defense.
There is much criticism in the House of the slow start of the booster campaign. The Netherlands is at the bottom of Europe when it comes to booster shots. As a result, experts say, elderly people have died, especially in nursing homes who would not have died with a timely booster campaign.. In Italy, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom it is already possible for every person over 18 to get a booster, but the Netherlands is far from that.
Don’t draw conclusions
De Jonge thinks the questions from parliament about the booster campaign that has started slowly, but did not want to draw any conclusions yet. ‘I think it is a good idea to put that question to the RIVM and the Health Council,’ he said.
Caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte and De Jonge also believe that the campaign is now gaining momentum and could not have started earlier. ‘We cannot start until we have received advice from the Health Council. The House would never have accepted that either,” Rutte said in the debate. The advice to boost the elderly only came on November 2, but even after that it took a few weeks before a major campaign was started.
700 thousand
According to De Jonge, about 700,000 booster shots will have been taken by the end of this week. This is largely due to the hospitals, which will have boosted around 300,000 employees. The GGD comes to 180 thousand. Since 18 November, mobile elderly people can go to the screening street, from old to young. Since Wednesday it is the turn of people from 1940. From next Friday, people with Down syndrome can also make a booster appointment.
Non-mobile elderly people living at home will now also be pricked by the GGD, and GPs are cooperating with this. The general practitioners united in the action committee Het Roer Moet Om on Thursday called on all their colleagues to boost these elderly people from their own practice as soon as possible. Remarkable in this regard: the general practitioners are calling on the mandatory waiting period of fifteen minutes after a vaccination (to monitor the risk of anaphylactic shock) to be ignored. ‘The obligation of waiting 15 minutes after the booster shot hinders the speed and adds almost nothing to safety. People have usually already been vaccinated twice with the same product, allergies are known. Speed is of the utmost importance,” the doctors write.
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