Through a statement, AstraZeneca has reported that it plans to deliver 30.1 million doses by the end of March and another 20 million in April. A figure well below its contracted goal of 90 million doses.
The company had said its initial supply cuts were caused by production problems in the EU. “I see efforts, but not the ‘best possible efforts’. It is still not good enough for AstraZeneca to meet its first quarter obligations,” said EU industry commissioner Thierry Breton from his Twitter account.
“The vaccination will continue with normality with other batches”, since the Ministry of Health of the Principality remarks that “it has not stopped the vaccination with AstraZeneca”.
To date, Asturias has administered 147,774 doses of vaccines, 134,245 of which are from Pfizer, 8,019 from Moderna and 5,510 from AstraZeneca.
The Principality assured that the vaccination “will continue normally” with other batches, like the rest of Spain, despite the fact that on Sunday it withdrew a specific batch of AstraZeneca after the death of a person diagnosed with multiple thrombosis and the disease of another coinciding with your vaccination.
The Public Health commission has not yet decided to authorize or definitively prohibit the use of doses for that age group, so it has been decided to postpone the decision.
In this way, the request of autonomies such as Catalonia and the Community of Madrid, which had requested for days the authorization to inoculate this demographic segment with the AstraZeneca vaccine, remains unanswered.
AstraZeneca applied for approval for the use of its vaccine in Japan in early February, and is still pending the necessary go-ahead from the Japanese Ministry of Health.
Japan plans to receive 120 million doses of AstraZeneca, enough for 60 million people, of which 30 million will be produced by Daiichi Sankyo and the pharmaceutical company KM Biologics, while JCR Pharmaceuticals will produce another 90 million, according to the Kyodo agency.
Faced with this situation, the United Nations is concerned about whether countries renounce nationalist policies and favor access to vaccines for the poorest countries.
The Prime Minister of Portugal, António Costa, announced this at a press conference and recalled that the rest of the external borders are subject to the rules agreed with the European Union, including “special restrictions” for those people who come from “higher risk countries. “like the United Kingdom, Brazil, or South Africa.
Likewise, it advanced a reopening “on a trickle basis” as of Easter. He stressed that despite the fact that the new numbers of cases are “frankly low”, the situation continues to be “worse” than when the first state of alarm was decreed on September 11 and on May 4 when the first deconfinement began.
The Minister of Health of the Community of Madrid, Enrique Ruiz Escudero, appeared at the same time as Carolina Darias did to report that the regional government will not abide by the decision, because the decree of the State of Alarm makes it clear who has the powers to take decisions in this matter and in this case is the regional president.
“Our position has been very clear. Madrid is not going to close the perimeter, “said Escudero, who justified his refusal because it is a technical decision.
Regarding the hospitalization of patients with Covid-19, throughout the state there are 8,759 patients admitted to the ward, a figure that has fallen significantly compared to the 9,116 registered yesterday.
In ICUs, the occupancy of beds has also decreased, although not so markedly, and it has gone from 2,320 admitted patients to 2,264.
The autonomous communities have notified the Ministry of Health on Tuesday 9,129 new cases in the last 24 hours and 166 deaths.
In the last week alone, almost 500 people have died from Covid-19 throughout the state.
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