Surge in Covid vaccines: From 11% to 37% of available doses given in two days

VACCINES against Covid have suddenly soared over the last few days in Spain, with over a third of those available now having been administered.

So far, 277,976 people – care home residents and staff – have been immunised, out of the 743,925 doses received to date.

Of these, 70,653 people were inoculated on the same day.

The vaccine used is the Pfizer version, developed in Germany by a Turkish-born husband-and-wife team, and which has been confirmed as effective against the 'new' strains of the virus detected in the UK and South Africa.

Asturias is the region with the best record so far for vaccine administration, at 75% of available doses (17,843 out of 23,720), followed by the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the northern African coast at 63.4% and 67% respectively, and Galicia, in the north-west of the mainland, with 65.9% of the total of 37,555 doses available – 24,750 of them – having been administered.

Castilla y León has given 55.1% of its vaccines, Andalucía 49.5% and Aragón 41.9%.

At present, 12 of Spain's 19 autonomously-governed territories are still below a 40% vaccination rate – Murcia (34.9%), Castilla-La Mancha (34.8%), the Canary Islands (34.6%), the Balearic Islands (33.2%), Catalunya (32.2%), Navarra (31.2%), and the Basque Country (31%) hover at around a third.

Bottom of the list are the Greater Madrid region, with only 14.3% of vaccines administered (14,152 out of 98,790), Cantabria (19.7%), Extremadura (21.8%), Valencia (26.1%), and La Rioja (28.3%).

Spain is receiving weekly deliveries of 360,000 doses, sent to the central government health ministry and then distributed among the regions based upon their population size.

Jabs were first given on December 27, and are beginning with care home workers and residents, then to extend to hospital workers and the over-65s, public sector customer-facing workers such as teachers, police officers and councillors, pregnant and lactating women, and finally, once everyone else has been immunised, non-key workers under 65 and with no physical health conditions will be vaccinated.

At first, the roll-out caused complaints from all sides, as the distribution among regions was found to be unequal, and as at the middle of this week, nearly a fortnight after the first vaccines were administered, only just over 11% had been given, which authorities and the general public considered to be too slow.

The pace has picked up substantially since, though, with 37.4% of doses available now having been given. 

Also this week, on Wednesday (January 6), the European Commission authorised the US-based Moderna vaccine for use within the European Union.

The second on the continent to come into circulation, after the Pfizer-BioNTech version, the Moderna vaccine will be packaged at and distributed from the Rovi laboratories in Madrid, serving the whole of the European continent, Asia and Latin America.

About 600,000 Moderna vaccines will arrive in Spain within the next six weeks, the first doses reaching Spanish soil by about mid-January.

Meanwhile, yesterday (Friday, January 8), the European Commission signed for the purchase of another 300 million Pfizer-BioNTech immunisation doses, doubling the number so far in stock in the EU.

According to Spain's health minister Salvador Illa, Spain will receive about 10% of these 300 million, although this will depend upon which countries request them.

The likely total of around 30 million will not arrive in Spain all at once, however, but will filter through over the next few weeks.

Illa says the government's intention is to have 70% of the population of Spain vaccinated by this coming summer.