The number of vaccines administered in Flanders will have a dip for the next two weeks, but the pace will pick up again in May. Early doses of Pfizer give an extra boost.
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After the provisional record of almost 360,000 injections this week in Flanders, the rest of the month is there some less vaccines on the program. Next week, according to the provisional planning, there will be 233,154, although the doses of the Janssen vaccine are still included. That vaccine is in quarantine pending an opinion from the European Medicines Agency EMA, which is investigating a possible link between that vaccine and the very rare formation of blood clots in combination with a reduced number of platelets. The pace will pick up again from May, with 337,000 doses on the schedule for the first full week. The Agency for Care and Health, which manages the vaccines in Flanders, expects it to be even higher due to the early delivery of nearly 1.3 million Pfizer vaccines for our country. The first batches will arrive at the end of April and can be delivered a few days later.
Photo: Care and Health
This week’s record will certainly be broken in the second half of May, in order to push it up a notch in the summer months, as expected. “To put it in cycling terms: in June, the graph of jabs per week will show some cols outside of category,” said Dirk Dewolf, general administrator of the Agency for Care and Health, just at a press briefing. ‘We can also expect high peaks in July. We expect to get to the eighteen-year-olds then. ‘
The number of injections per week depends on the vaccines supplied, the figures of which can fluctuate. Changes in the vaccination strategy also have an effect. For example, no second injections are planned next week because in March it was decided to increase the interval between two doses of Pfizer from three to five weeks. There is also nothing punctured from AstraZeneca. “That has nothing to do with the possible side effects, but with the lower deliveries in recent weeks,” says Dewolf. ‘The numbers that AstraZeneca announces are difficult to reliable, so we are waiting to set quotas (for the administration, ed.) Until they arrive physically.’
Seventy percent
The day before yesterday, the Consultation Committee linked possible relaxation on May 8, including the opening of terraces and a larger ‘outdoor bubble’, to a vaccination rate of 70 percent of the over-65s. The vaccination rate of Flemish people above that age is now at 58 percent, which is what Flemish Minister of Health Wouter Beke (CD&V) suspects that this 70 percent will be reached by the end of next week.
‘The vaccination coverage of the oldest groups is very high in Flanders,’ says Dewolf. ‘There is a significant difference with other regions in Belgium.’ In Wallonia and Brussels in particular, the vaccination rate among the elderly is up to more than twenty percent lower.
Because large volumes are injected in May and June, there will be several campaigns in Flanders to encourage people to get vaccinated.
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