Dominican Medical Association asks the Government to bring vaccines in January

Santo Domingo.– The president of the Dominican Medical Association (CMD), Waldo Ariel Suero, said today that he informed President Luis Abinader of the physicians’ interest in prioritizing vaccines against COVID-19 from the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna instead of the one developed by Oxford/AstraZeneca.

Suero understands that vaccination should begin in January and not in March, as authorities have announced.

In October last year, the Government signed an agreement with British biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to purchase 10 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine. A first payment of US$8 million was provided by the private sector, of the US$40 million that the purchase required.

The vaccine has already been approved by the Health Ministry’s Medicine, Food and Medical Products Dept. (Digemaps), which granted it a special temporary permit.

“Its effectiveness (that of AstraZeneca) is being highly questioned,” said Dr. Suero. “Some studies say it is 60 percent effective, others say the effectiveness range from 60 to 90 percent depending on the combinations made. The point is that it is not as effective as Pfizer, in the first place, and Moderna.”

Both vaccines favored by the Medical Association have reported an efficacy greater than 94% and are developed within the category of mRNA (messenger RNA) vaccines, a genetic sequence created in the laboratory that “teaches” the body’s cells to produce proteins similar to the Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease.