The vaccination programme against Covid-19 will accelerate in the coming weeks and should reach the threshold of 130,000 inoculations per day in July.

According to the Minister for Health: “Our goal is to ensure that in July we can reach more than 130,000 vaccines administered per day. The ‘task force’ has been working intensely to maximise all opportunities for vaccination, in terms of availability of vaccines and taking advantage of the schedules and resources allocated to this process”, said Marta Temido.

Marta Temido reiterated that the option of vaccination against Covid-19 in pharmacies remains “a possibility”, while explaining the reasons why self-scheduling was not immediately accessible to people over 35, as initially announced, but only to those who are at least 37-years-old (as of the time of going to press).

“It will have been a matter of managing the process itself. When you open the vaccination for a certain age group, people automatically come and a waiting phenomenon is generated. If we open in two phases over the same week, we can manage the responses better and we are convinced that this will be a better solution for those who intend to self-schedule”, she stressed.

On the other hand, the government official admitted that vaccination without age discrimination has been a subject of “discussions”, given the higher incidence of new cases in recent weeks among young people in the population (20-29 years old) who are not yet included in the process, but reiterated the priority given to protecting the most susceptible age groups.

“Right now, our goal continues to be to vaccinate as much as possible, but still focus on the age groups at greatest risk. The ones who are getting most infected are the 20-29 age group, but the ones who are most in need of hospital care are the 40-50 age group. So the logic of protecting those who are most vulnerable, even though others are likely to have a higher number of cases, holds,” she noted.

However, Marta Temido made a point of stressing the expectation that the inclusion of the age group of people over 20 years of age would occur “in mid-July” and stressed that the core teams are being strengthened within the scope of the vaccination plan.