The Municipal Health Department of São Paulo asked the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa), this Thursday (2), authorization to reduce the time of application of the booster dose of vaccines against Covid-19.
The proposal is that the extra dose can be applied four months, not five, after the citizen completes the vaccination cycle.
The information has been confirmed to CNN by the secretary of Health of the capital, Edson Aparecido, and later announced at a press conference on Thursday.
In the letter addressed to the director-president of Anvisa, Antônio Barra Torres, the Municipal Health Surveillance Coordination mentions the “occurrence of possible events and festivities at the end of the year”, as well as the “non-mandatory, until the moment of presentation of the passport of vaccines to foreigners entering the country”, to carry out the “exceptional and extraordinary authorization” to the organ.
One of the reasons to anticipate this application is also the emergence of the Ômicron variant, which already has three confirmed cases in the state of SP.
On Wednesday (1), the secretary also declared to the CNN that 1 million people from São Paulo who could have taken the booster dose have not yet attended the vaccination posts.
According to Aparecido, the Minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, would also agree that “the most effective way to combat the new variant is to advance in the vaccination of the booster dose”, declared the secretary.
The municipality is evaluating whether the year-end festivities and Carnival in 2022 will be affected by the arrival of Ômicron.
“We are going to base ourselves, as we always have, on the studies of Sanitary Surveillance. The study by the city’s Epidemiological Surveillance is ready at the end of the week, and it will dictate exactly the decision regarding the issue of New Year’s Eve. Carnival is in three months. It still has a lot of time to organize itself”, declared Aparecido.
Reference: CNN Brasil
