With 203 cases of Delta variant, RJ orders 15% more vaccines than Health

On July 27, a letter sent by the Minister of Health of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Alexander Ship, to the Ministry of Health requested “additional doses of vaccines”.

The official document he obtained CNN It was sent when the state still had 81 confirmed cases of the delta variant. This Friday (6), the number more than doubled, there are already 203 records out of a total of 460 across the country.

The message was not answered and a new one was sent a week later, last Wednesday (4). This time, the text was even clearer: It asked the federal government to assess “the possibility of a 15% increase in doses in new shipments to the state and” the possibility of offering the Pfizer vaccine to 21 days, according to
Recommended by the product laboratory.

For this, several reasons are listed. Also in the first letter, in addition to the societal transfer of the delta variant, the government drew attention to the “tourist profession of the state as the main transit border of the population.”

But in the second official letter, the state health department acknowledged that there could be “potential technical losses from multi-dose bottles, even using scheduling strategies and calling the population to vaccinate in order to avoid using leftovers in bottles.”

The request comes at a time when other states such as Sao Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul are questioning the health ministry’s distribution. CNNThe ministry said that it will provide “gradual compensation for the quantities of vaccines sent in a supplementary manner, so that all countries finish the immunization process without there being any benefit or harm to their population.”

They say that in the case of Rio de Janeiro, since the beginning of the vaccination campaign, 16.6 million doses have already been sent and “a new distribution is scheduled for this week”. And the country said last Wednesday (4) that it had received 15.7 million doses for a population of 13.4 million people.