The eight Ministers of Health in our country have been together again for 8 hours. On the program: consultation on vaccination strategy. A press conference will follow around 11 am at which a concrete plan would be presented.
“As it stands now, our country will be able to start vaccinating on January 5th.” Prime Minister Alexander De Croo (Open Vld) said this in a short statement yesterday. “When the vaccines are ready, our country will be ready and we will have clear agreements on how that will be done.”
The questions at hand are obvious. Who is given priority when vaccinating? Who will administer those vaccines? And how will communication proceed about this? Yesterday everything passed through the core of deputy prime ministers, today the ministers of health are knocking on an inter-ministerial conference.
Initially, it was expected that the vaccination strategy would be finalized yesterday morning at such an inter-ministerial conference. According to Flemish Minister of Welfare Wouter Beke (CD&V), the regions were ready to decide on this, but asked Minister of Health Frank Vandenbroucke (sp.a) to let the file pass through the core.
Surprise
It was therefore a great surprise to some that De Croo already put forward a concrete date yesterday. However, the Prime Minister’s office has said that this date has more to do with the European approval process. Since both Moderna and Pfizer applied for a marketing authorization yesterday from the European Medicines Agency (EMA), it is also possible to estimate when the first vaccines will be available at the earliest: early January.
However, the ministers of Health decided yesterday to subscribe to the European purchase procedure for the Moderna vaccine. If that vaccine gets a market license, Belgium will buy 2 million doses. It has previously been decided to purchase 7.5 million doses from AstraZeneca, 5 million from Johnson & Johnson, 5 million from Pfizer / BioNTech and 2.9 million from CureVac. They all need to be administered twice, except for Johnson & Johnson.
Who gets priority?
The fact that the vaccination strategy was not finalized yesterday does not mean that there are major bottlenecks, everyone emphasized. In fact, there is already unanimity about the broad outlines. According to Caroline Leys, spokesman for Corona Commissioner Pedro Facon, the plan is already “very concrete”. “It’s just a validation,” says Leys. “Although it seems logical to me that you also submit the plan to the core deputy prime ministers. Vaccination is one of the most important pillars for crisis management. ”
With regard to the priority list, politicians will probably follow the advice of the Superior Health Council (SHC) of July. Specifically, three groups are given priority: health workers, people over 65 years old and people over 45 years with underlying conditions. The first group is necessary to keep the health system running. The other two groups are most at risk of infection and are therefore protected as a priority.
Teaching staff
In the Flemish Parliament, Beke said that there is still some discussion about the next step: the other essential sectors, such as the police and the fire brigade. If it depends on Flanders, that includes the teaching staff.
Who will administer the vaccines and where? That will strongly depend on the target group and the type of vaccine. “The first vaccine will probably be from Pfizer and it has the disadvantage that you have to keep it at minus 70 degrees,” says virologist Steven Van Gucht of the Sciensano health institute. “That is why it will be more interesting to use that vaccine in specific places, such as hospitals and residential care centers.”
For the vast majority of the population, the Think Tank Corona Vaccine Distribution recommends that the vaccination be administered at the level of the districts or out-of-hours GP posts. Logistics is the easiest to organize.
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