COVID-19: more than 2 million AstraZeneca vaccines will expire at the end of March, warns former minister Ugarte | Synopharm | COVID-19 | NMR | PERU

Minsa confirms disagreements with AstraZeneca

At the end of January, Hernando Cevallos pointed out that Peru would receive a large number of doses from AstraZeneca with expiration dates of less than six months. He explained that the contract was signed on December 31, 2020, during the management of Francisco Sagasti, and that despite not meeting the delivery dates, no penalty is contemplated for the British pharmaceutical company if it fails to comply with the agreement.

When asked about to a possible international legal claim against the AstraZeneca laboratorythe official stated that to date they have been looking for solutions: find countries that accept the donation of these batches of vaccines against COVID-19, despite the fact that some nations have already expressed that they will not be able to accept this support due to the short expiration date of the doses.

“In December 2020, the previous government signs an agreement with AstraZeneca for about 14 million vaccines. Contracts in general have clauses that clearly favor companies. They are contracts of a confidential nature, which is a disadvantage for the recipient country of the vaccines where delivery times are indicated, which, in this case, was mostly from the month of September and deadlines are also indicated for the expiration of the products. what In my opinion, they are absolutely abusive and do not allow countries to manage them with more logical health criteria”He commented at the time.

Dose application decrease

The former head of Immunizations of the Minsa, Gabriela Jiménez, pointed out last Thursday that the progress in the vaccination process decreased during the first 15 days of March.

In a dialogue with RPP Noticias, he recalled that up to the end of February, 63 million 50 thousand doses had been administered. “We have made a calculation where we compared the speed of the vaccine that we have had in the first 58 days of 2022 starting from January 1 to February 28. (…) So the daily vaccination average was 210,000 a day”.

“In that scenario, we had a speed of the third dose of 111 thousand vaccinated per day. However, when we are now reviewing the figures corresponding to the first 15 days of March, we find that the rate of vaccination in the third-dose vaccination group has fallen by an average/day of 56,000, from what we used to do to 111,000, which leads us to a negative variation rate of -50%. And when we see the vaccines in the first doses of daily production that we had from 52,000 to 53,000, we have fallen to a daily average of 31,000, we are talking about a negative variation rate of -38% “he detailed.

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