Second dose of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine rolled out to care homes and public hospitals

Additionally 1,000 professionals from Malaga’s private health system have also received their first jabs

The coronavirus vaccination campaign in Andalucía has entered the phase of injecting the second dose in care homes and to public health professionals who fight the pandemic on the front line.

Twenty-one days after the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine was injected, nurses began administering the second yesterday.

The vaccine is claimed to be 95 per cent effective and it takes a week from the second dose for immunity to build.

At the Hospital Clínico in Malaga a hundred health professionals received their second doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The first was a cleaner, María Isabel Agredano.

“I am very excited. The vaccine is the great hope that humanity has to get out of the pandemic. We have suffered a disastrous year because of the Covid, in which we have lived very bad times,” said María Isabel Agredano after the second dose was injected.

The hospital has already vaccinated about half of its 4,500 staff with the first dose.

The second doses will continue to be given throughout the week in care homes, social health centres and public hospitals where 21 days have elapsed since the first injection was administered.

Every week, 20 per cent of the vaccines received in Andalucía are kept aside as a security reserve to guarantee that the second dose is inoculated to everyone who is entitled. The regional government holds the reserve in case of logistical problems or delays in distribution due to bad weather.

In addition, this Monday, the first dose was given to about a thousand professionals who deal with potential SARS-CoV-2 patients in private hospitals in Malaga.

The Malaga College of Physicians explained in a statement that it had managed to obtain 1,000 doses from the regional government for private health personnel who are working close to patients with Covid or suspected of suffering from it.

But the College of Physicians has warned that the rate of vaccinations across the region is slow and more doses of vaccines are needed.

“Every day that passes is a day that lives are being lost,” stressed the president of the association, Juan José Sánchez Luque.

Because of production changes at the Pfizer plant in Belgium the number of doses that will arrive in Spain for a few weeks will be reduced by 41 per cent, although from the end of February there will be a significant increase in supply.

Source: SUR in English, January 2021.