This Tuesday, sources from the Santa Fe Ministry of Health confirmed to La Capital that the bivalent vaccines against Covid will begin to be placed next week in Rosario.
Although it had been announced that the application would begin in the last week of January, a delay with the delivery of the syringes by the Nation delayed the start of this stage of the campaign against Covid.
40,000 doses have already arrived in Rosario, of the 70,000 that the Nation ordered for the province.
Bivalent vaccines are intended for people over 12 years of age, and are used as a booster, provided that four months have passed since the last dose. They will not be used to start the protection scheme (the first two vaccines).
During the last days, as indicated by the ministry, the distribution in the different towns of Santa Fe of these vaccines that require special logistics since they must be kept at a very low temperature, between -50º and -80º, has been completed.
Those that arrived in Santa Fe, sent from the Nation, are vaccines from the Pfizer laboratory that offer protection against the original strain of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic and also the Omicron subvariant. The previous ones (which also continue to be applied are monovalent: they do not include subvariants).
Sebastián Torres, undersecretary for Health Promotion of the provincial health portfolio, told this newspaper that “there was a small delay that has to do with disposable supplies that have not yet arrived but are yet to arrive.” The official pointed out that “in the next few days the exact date on which Rosario will be able to be vaccinated” with a bivalent vaccine will be reported, but he assured that it will be next week.
Torres also said that all the vaccinators who regularly apply doses against Covid will receive the bivalent ones, while stressing that the national ministry “will deliver more vaccines.”
The details
The FDA (the US agency that approves medicines and therapies in the North country and is taken as a reference by Anmat, the local agency) last year authorized bivalent vaccines.
The control body pointed out that “the bivalent vaccines against Covid-19, from Moderna and Pfizer, include a messenger RNA component corresponding to the original strain to provide an immune response that is broadly protective against Covid and an RNA component messenger corresponding to the BA.4 and BA.5 lineages of the Omicron variant to provide better protection against the disease caused by that variant” (which is the one currently circulating).
People receiving the updated (bivalent) vaccines “may experience similar side effects reported by people who received previous doses of the original Covid mRNA vaccines (monovalent).”
Meanwhile, the scientific community is studying the durability of the antibodies of this new development. It is estimated, in principle, that it is from 9 to 10 months, unlike the monovalent ones that four months after being applied begin to lose effectiveness.
The current panorama shows a drop in cases of Covid infections throughout the country. In Rosario, the decline is clear (cases fell 64% in the last week), however, for next autumn/winter, the health authorities insist on the need to continue applying the booster doses against Covid to try to maintain the number of cases at bay.
