In recent hours, the Ministry of Health issued a warning about the application of vaccines from the Moderna pharmaceutical company in Colombia, due to the fact that there are shortages of these in the country. The entity announced that the biologicals of said laboratory They will only be applied to Colombians who need the second dose against COVID-19, that is, the vaccine will not be used to start an immunization schedule, nor for booster doses or third doses.
Gerson Bermont, director of Promotion and Prevention of the Ministry of Health, was in charge of making the call to health personnel. “Do not spend Moderna’s vaccines on first doses because we will not be able to respond to them with second doses at the time. Do not spend Moderna vaccines on booster doses because we are not going to have enough vaccines. They are exact, so let’s be judicious“, warned the official.
To date, the Ministry of Health has 1,006,820 doses of this pharmaceutical company, so those who want to start their vaccination schedule will have to do so with the vaccine from other laboratories.. In the case of children between 12 and 17 years old, they will receive the biological from Pfizer or Sinovac. It is worth mentioning that the vice president, Marta Lucía Ramírez, announced that in the next few days Colombia will receive a shipment with 2.4 million Pfizer doses donated by the German government.
Ministry of Health insists on the application of third doses
Given the increase in positive cases of coronavirus in the country, the Ministry of Health has invited citizens to go to the vaccination points to apply the booster dose. “It is essential that those over 50 years of age who have not yet received the booster vaccine do so now, to prevent the peak of infections that the country has been registering from affecting their health and that of those around them,” the Ministry said.
Similarly, the National Government asserted that Colombia is going through the fourth peak of the pandemic, so biosecurity measures must be reinforced. “In Colombia, more than 95 percent of the genomic surveillance isolates correspond to the omicron variant. Wherever ómicron arrives, it becomes dominant, and where it becomes dominant, it generates abrupt peaks,” said the director of Epidemiology and Demography of the Ministry of Health, Julián Fernández Niño.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that 68,156,006 coronavirus vaccines have been applied in Colombia. 33,738,268 citizens have already received the first dose, 29,932,016 already have the complete vaccination schedule and 5,488,948 Colombians have been immunized with Janssen. Bogotá is the city in which the most doses have been applied (12,229,786), followed by Antioquia (9,569,466) and Valle del Cauca (5,440,754).