Bahia Notícias / Saúde / Notícias / Saúde sent 1,200 expired doses of Covid vaccine to the country; Salvador could have come forward

As many as 160 cities in 23 states have given expired vaccines against Covid-19 to the population, according to official data from the Ministry of Health, including two from Bahia. Salvador and Pedro Alexander could have used doses of the Oxford / AstraZeneca immunosuppressant that have passed their expiration date.

The second scan of the portal capital Cities, Partial immunization data collected by the paste show that 1254 subjects were vaccinated with pooled doses of expired immune systems. The capital of Bahian was to apply four of them and Pedro Alexander one.

The problem includes three batches of vaccines produced by AstraZeneca in partnership with the University of Oxford manufactured in India and imported ready-made from Brazil, with number 4120Z001, 4120Z004 and 4120Z005. They are groups of fortifications that have already expired, six months old.

The arrival of the first batches of a vaccine produced by the Serum Institute, in India, suffered from uncertainty and come and go. On December 31 of last year, Fiocruz ordered and obtained permission from the National Health Monitoring Agency (Anvisa) to import two million doses.

Two weeks later, on January 14, the then Minister of Health, Eduardo Pazuelo, promised that the plane would depart Brazil on the same day to collect the doses. The Azul plane was registered by the government marketing team, but the flight was canceled, and India did not release the vaccines until the following week. They arrived on January 22, and began distributing to the states the next day.

Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), responsible for production of Covishield in Brazil, indicated that the three pieces in question came exactly on that flight. It was produced in October last year in the Asian country. Official data records the application of vaccines up to 21 days after the expiration date.

Epidemiologist Carla Dominguez, who coordinated the Ministry of Health’s National Immunization (PNI) program between 2011 and 2019, said in an interview with Metrópoles that applying vaccines after the expiration date is “a procedural mistake, his responsibility is the edge: municipality, vaccine room.”

According to her, the public order was as a rule not to send vaccines younger than 3 months old to federal authorities. “In a special situation, as now, you can relax for a month, but there has to be agility.”