The information was provided by the coordinator of the Interministerial Commission to Combat and Prevention against Covid-19, Francisco Furtado, when he updated the presidential decree of the state of public calamity on the pandemic.
"We are concerned about vaccination, the country has more than 12 million people with one dose of vaccination, but it has only 4.3 million with two doses of vaccination, which means that we have in the whole country so far, about eight million people who have not taken the second dose of the vaccine, which is quite worrying, because a single dose does not completely immunize the citizen", said Francisco Furtado.
The also Minister of State and head of the Military House of the President of the Republic stressed that, on the other hand, the country is "at a critical moment", because some vaccines are approaching the end of their validity period.
"Right now the country has, until March, about five million vaccines that will expire their period of use. Contrary to these five million vaccines, which are about to expire, we have eight million or so people who did not receive the second dose of the vaccine," he said.
Among the vaccines that will expire, Francisco Furtado highlighted AstraZeneca, on the 30th of this month.
"Among this number, I must draw attention to the fact that there are more than 900,000 people who have taken the second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine and, of this number of people, the country has about 800,000 vaccines that will expire until the 30th of this month, which This means that people who have not taken the second dose of the AstraZenca vaccine must go to the vaccination posts to take it, because from the 30th we will have vaccines that cannot be administered to populations", he stressed.
The official stressed that the vaccination process continued throughout the country on a regular basis, however, it is still far from the target of vaccination of the 60 percent of the target population, "for the sustained herd immunity that is intended".
Covid-19 has caused 5,519,380 deaths worldwide since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the latest report by the Agence France-Presse.
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
A new variant, Ómicron, considered worrying and very contagious by the World Health Organization (WHO), has been detected in Southern Africa, but since the South African health authorities gave the alert in November, infections have been reported in at least 110 countries.
