The pace quickens

According to El Pais, Spain will be receiving its first shipment of 300,000 doses of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccines “first thing on Wednesday". In total Spain is expecting five million doses of this one shot vaccine to arrive before the start of summer. The Health Minister said on Monday that the first group in line for the vaccine will be people between 70 and 79 years of age.

According to the latest Health Ministry report, 13.3% of the population in the 70-to-79 age bracket has had at least one dose of the three vaccines now being used in Spain. But changing criteria over the use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine have created a paradoxical situation. The rate of vaccination in the 60-69 age group is greater than the 70-to-79 group  even though the coronavirus has a more serious effect in older people. This is because the over-80s were the priority group for the Pfizer vaccine (91.4% have had at least one shot) while the under-65s were receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine leaving our age group out in the cold.

My neighbor, Pepe tells me that we should receive our text messages within the next couple of weeks and that it will be at the mass vaccination centre in Orihuela where we will be called for our jabs.

UPDATE

One of our English neighbors, who is 79, tells me that he and his wife had their first jab last week. They received a phone call at about 10am from their doctor who told them to go down to the Centro Salud there and then. I assume the Centre had vaccine left over and rather than waste it, they called the next people in line. Normally, you would get a text message with a date. They both had the Pfizer version and will have their second dose on the 27th.