Sílvia Lucutuca, who was speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the presentation of a statement to mark World Health Day, reacted to the conclusion of the Risk Assessment Committee on Drug Surveillance (PRAC) about a possible link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clot formation problems.
"We continue to reiterate here that the vaccine is safe and that it saves lives. There is no harmless drug and that we always have to assess the risks and benefits, and, in this particular case of covid-19, the lack of a dose of vaccine. or two doses, in the specific case of AstraZeneca, an incalculable cost can be incurred, which is the loss of life ", said the minister.
The official also stressed that "there are people who already have a natural tendency to form clots". According to the minister, additional care must be taken for them, "but the number of people with clots without vaccines and people vaccinated, there is thus no increase caused by the vaccine and that is what we must retain".
The holder of the portfolio of Health recalled that the country already has the record of deaths of health professionals, one of the groups eligible at this time, for not taking the vaccine.
"We must not pay with our lives and lose the opportunity to be vaccinated and we can save our lives. The professionals we refer to, some of them, at least one, with some responsibility in their area of operation, had made the record of all colleagues, he didn’t get vaccinated and after 15 days he was dying with covid-19 ", he said.
"We do not want our professionals, who are very exposed, to take unnecessary risks with a vaccine. This is not the only case, we had another one recently in Benguela, and all of them were not vaccinated," she added.
Sílvia Lutucuta underlined that vaccination reduces the serious forms of the disease and also prevents mortality, with studies carried out in the United Kingdom, which attest to an 80% reduction in the number of cases of infection in health professionals, with the AstraZeneca vaccine, and zero percent mortality.
"We will always look at the benefits that the vaccine brings. The vaccine is cheap, safe, it saves lives and we will not lose our lives because we are not vaccinated", she concluded.
In the beginning of March, Angola received 624 thousand doses of vaccines from AstraZeneca, within the scope of the Covax initiative, which allowed the launch of its National Vaccination Plan against Covid-19, with priority given to the population most at risk of becoming ill or dying from the disease. , namely health professionals, elderly people over 65 with comorbidities, and teachers.
This activity will be developed during the current year, in order to achieve the goals established by the National Vaccination Plan against covid-19 to vaccinate about 15 million citizens.
In her statement on World Health Day, Sílvia Lutucuta said that the positive trend of increasing public investment in health was significant, despite the challenging macroeconomic framework, having benefited from around 6 percent of the General State Budget since 2017, " progressively moving towards reaching the Abuja commitment to allocate 15 percent of the State Budget to the health sector ".
The minister also highlighted the significant increase in human resources, with the entry of 25,465 new health professionals and the focus on valuing human capital, with almost all of the newly recruited human resources at the level of the municipalities and many of them priority medical specialists started.
