Eduardo Rodríguez Rovira -- A stubborn vaccination

Discouragement sets in when we see that we are not only the developed country with the highest number of deaths per inhabitant due to Covid-19, with the highest rates of economic destruction, the highest unemployment rate and the biggest stock market crash during 2020, but that at the beginning of 2021 we rank low in the number of vaccinations given to our vulnerable population in the first days of their reception. This can no longer be dismissed with circumstantial pretexts, but is a systemic problem affecting public institutions.

Unfortunately, they die two people The news of a snow accident continues for days, all efforts are made, even on weekends, to rescue the bodies, which is commendable, and the extraordinary efforts are only stopped when the rescuers' lives are in danger. They die every day several dozen people because of this pandemic and we have become accustomed to it as if it were the norm and it would not be worth the small effort to vaccinate on public holidays. hundreds of high-risk people to prevent many from joining this lethal plague.

It is not surprising that Israel is internationally one of the most effective countries in the vaccination process. Prevention, training, good logistical preparation and political determination are expected of them. Other countries use pretexts to explain delays, including forgetting the lack of refrigerators to store the doses (an unforgivable pretext also used in Spain). A major Western European country has recently started to seek private consultants to ensure logistics, instead of having done so months ago.

But what happens internationally, happens within Spain. The vaccination rate in the first days was 60% in Asturias compared to 5% in Cantabria, to use two neighbouring regions, very similar with two extreme situations. What does Asturias say? That they have vaccinated from the very first moment, even on public holidays, that they planned it with time and that they provided the resources. It is not worth investigating the pretexts that the Director of Public Health in Cantabria may have put forward, but they were not enough to prevent her dismissal this week.

The issue of resources is interesting. The government boasted that there would be no less than 13,000 vaccination centres (the Health Centres). How effective are these centres if only 139,339 people have been vaccinated in 9 days?

The army has made available to the Communities personnel trained to carry out the vaccinations. Only one Community has declared that it accepts this. The same has been done by the private health sector with many thousands of professionals, including pharmacists, dentists and veterinarians, or by mutual insurance companies or some NGOs with health expertise. Even nursing homes, with well-trained nurses, have offered to do it for free. There should be no problem of delays due to lack of resources. But even ideology is involved in something so simple. The Community of Madrid is criticised for contracting with the Red Cross, for a price of 804.000€, the service in the Residences with 24 employees, because it's privatisation! For the same reason, the unions want 15,000 professionals to be hired by the public health system, since colleagues who are not in the system are not worth it, as that would be giving money from the health system to the private sector, as if the nurses hired by the system were free. We thought that the important thing was to vaccinate quickly in order to save lives, not whether the person injecting the vaccine received his or her monthly salary from one place or another. The next thing will be to ban the vaccine because it is privately sourced and there are companies that are profiting from health.

I believe that we are not in a failed state but in a failed governments. In such an emergency situation as this, the Minister of Health combines his position, which he must consider of little importance in a pandemic, with his party work, at a time when the third wave is emerging with nearly 10,000 infections (by the time this article is published, it will unfortunately be more) and several dozen deaths per day.

I cannot but comment negatively on the absurd situation that some communities have confessed that they do not use all the vaccines, not to save them for the second dose, but to avoid emergency situations, delays or lack of supply. Instead of a central stockpile, 17 small stockpiles. On the other hand, it is a positive sign that criticism of the construction of the Isabel Zendal pandemic hospital, which is already successfully fulfilling its mission, has suddenly died down.

Let's wait and see what will happen at the end of January - it has been officially said that we are "picking up the pace" - to calculate after more than a month of vaccine application how long it will take to achieve herd immunity (i.e. the full vaccination, one or two vials depending on the vaccines, of 33 million Spaniards). Bets are welcome.

This text may be reproduced provided that PROA is credited as the original source.