Covid-19: Paraguay will quarantine batch of Russian vaccine until documentation is received

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Paraguayan Ministry of Health announced that it would quarantine 105,000 doses of Sputnik V, scheduled to arrive this Friday (24), until it receives from the Russian Investment Fund the documentation that guarantees good practices in the manufacturing process.

María Antonieta Gamarra, head of the National Direction of Sanitary Surveillance, said this Thursday in a press conference that the measure responds to the audit carried out by the World Health Organization to four laboratories that produce this vaccine, one of which did not send the required documentation.

Read also: Check out our coverage on Paraguay

The health ministry, which received the report today, indicated that the previous batches of Sputnik V arrived in the country, all of them for the first application, complied with the relevant regulations.

The consignment that will be retained is intended to complete the pattern in people who received the initial dose, said Héctor Castro, director of the Expanded Program of Immunization, at the press conference. The health official preferred not to comment on the possible use of doses of other brands in case the application of the 100,000 vaccines is discarded.

To date, about 2.6 million people have been vaccinated with the first dose in Paraguay, and a little more than 1.8 million have the complete regimen. The Ministry’s target population stands at 4.7 million, in a population of seven million.

Most of Paraguay’s 259 districts are at level one of transmission, the lowest, following several weeks of a steady decline in cases and deaths. This follows daily peaks of 2,000 positives and around 100 deaths earlier this year.

The latest report from the Ministry, on Wednesday afternoon, recorded two deaths and 25 positives, out of 2,129 samples.

The cumulative number of deaths in just over two years of pandemic is 16,138, while the cumulative number of infections is 459,720 and 442,230 recovered.