Costa Rica Faces Covid-19 Vaccine Shortage: Waiting for Donations to Resume Campaign

If you would like to get vaccinated or have any of your children vaccinated against covid-19, this will not be possible. The Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS) confirmed that they do not have stocks. There are none in private establishments either.

Elvis Delgado Delgado, from the CCSS Epidemiological Surveillance Subarea, indicated that “at this time there is no availability of any covid19 vaccine in the different presentations in the institution’s health facilities.”

The official stated that the availability of doses ended on December 8. However, two days later, the Ministry of Health made a social media post motivating vaccination. Within the comments, some people mentioned having searched for doses and not having found them.

Costa Rica is waiting for donations from Panama and the United States to resume the campaign. The CCSS did not specify when they would be finalized.

Some private pharmacies had stocks of these vaccines and provided them for free as part of an agreement with the Ministry of Health, but they also ran out, as confirmed by Massimo Manzi, executive director of the Chamber of Health, which brings together private centers.

“As a sector we wanted to open conversations with the Ministry of Health to explore how we can continue taking advantage of this public-private collaboration model to support other epidemiological areas in order to strengthen the country’s capacity in immunization issues,” he said.

The Nation consulted the Ministry of Health, the entity in charge of managing vaccines, and is awaiting the response. However, last September, when the United States began distributing an updated drug for the XBB.1.5 variant (common in Costa Rica), Salud was asked about its acquisition. The response was: “to date the country is not purchasing vaccines against covid-19.”

The last vaccines that were distributed were bivalent doses from a donation from Panama, at the end of last September. At that time, 28,998 doses arrived: 1,500 for children from 6 months to 4 years; 13,500 for children from 5 to 11 years old and 13,998 for people 12 years old and older.

The bivalent is a vaccine that arrived for the first time in Costa Rica in February and was used as a booster. Starting in September, the National Commission for Vaccination and Epidemiology (CNVE) changed the scheme and the bivalent vaccine began to be used from the first dose in those who had not previously received it.

It receives its name because it contains two variants: the “original” from Wuhan, contained in the first version of the vaccine, and the omicron. In our country, the drug produced by the companies Pfizer and BioNTech is used. This vaccine stopped being used in the United States and Europe when it was updated by the vaccine against the XBB.1.5 variant, which has also been on sale since this week in countries like Mexico.

However, the World Health Organization (WHO) establishes that these vaccines continue to protect against complications of a covid-19 infection.

This Wednesday, the presence in Costa Rica of the JN.1 variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, was confirmed, according to information from the Costa Rican Institute for Research and Teaching in Nutrition and Health (Inciensa).

It is a subvariant of the omicron variant, declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a variant of interest (VOI), due to its rapid spread worldwide, without meaning make your symptoms more severe.

missing

The vaccine against covid-19 is sold out in Costa Rica and we are waiting for future donations. (Rafael Pacheco Granados)

The reasons for the shortage could be mainly due to two factors: on the one hand, many people took advantage of the bivalent doses when they arrived in October. On the other hand, those interested in receiving vaccines had four or five vaccines administered; it is possible that other doses reached their expiration date.

In this sense, one of the main concerns of families is in relation to children who are six months old, since previously they had not been able to obtain a vaccine (the minimum age is six months of age) and now they must wait for them to arrive in the country. .

The most recent public data on vaccination against covid-19 in the CCSS dates back to September 29. At that time, 21.8% of the population had already received the bivalent. Among those over 58 years of age, 75% had applied the dose.

2023-12-21 11:03:00
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