One of the parliamentary committees of research most convulsive of recent months, and at the same time more discreet, has ended. This Wednesday, the body created in Congress to present to the Government a series of recommendations on future vaccination processes issued the final opinion. It remains to be endorsed by the plenary session of the Chamber for it to be public. Only a formal procedure is missing. But the spirit and content are already outlined. This newspaper agreed to the text, which has had the support of the PSOE, United We Can, ERC, More Country and Compromís. PNV and EH Bildu abstained. The PP has rejected it; Vox and Cs refused to attend the voting session. Their motives are diverse, but they point to the same place: partiality and partisanship.
This is how this commission, which was created at the request of Joan Baldovi. It is true that originally there was a political intention, derived from the cases of public officials who precisely took advantage of their status to sneak into the vaccination order, but not only. The claim of medical improvement was obvious. In the end, this prevailed, but it was not enough for the center-right groups. Controversial decisions have then been made by the Commission’s Board, including alleged vetoes to certain appearing parties such as Salvador Illa, Fernando Simón and Carolina Darias. In the end, PP, Vox and Cs declined to attend. They were experts from various fields, including a renowned expert in pharmacovigilance, a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who questioned the efficacy of vaccines.
about side effects
The report, with a schematic structure, 15 pages, is divided into two blocks: conclusions and recommendations. The second is the most relevant, since they are proposals to the Government. Time will tell if he accepts them. Time and political will.
Within the section of the proposals, two allude to the adverse effects that the vaccines have produced in some people. For example, menstrual disturbances. To generate more confidence in the population, in the face of “future vaccination processes”, the commission has advocated evaluating “the need to establish accompanying measures for affected people, such as medical and psychological assistance, pharmaceutical provision and rehabilitation services” .
This request, agreed upon by the groups as a result of an ERC initiativejoins two more concise ones (also at the request of Esquerra): one advocates the promotion of studies on “potential adverse reactions to vaccines against covid-19 and their long-term consequences on health”; the other claims the posting of batches than administered to those who have presented the effects.
Access to vaccines and more transparency
A series of headings guide the document. The first has to do with the universality of vaccines and the importance of European coordination. The objective here is not only to make it easier for everyone in a given country to receive the inoculation, but also for the inhabitants of developing, underdeveloped or, in general, countries with health systems to receive it. “less strong”.
To this end, the parliamentary commission advocates expanding production capacity, which is not enough only with the liberalization of intellectual property protection. The use of voluntary licenses in accordance with WHO criteria, technology transfer to other regions, the effort for a robust supply chain and support for more fragile health models are the strong points in this regard, according to the majority of the Congress.
Donating serum is not enough, therefore. For the signatories of the opinion, the health-prone countries must also be provided with syringes, diluents and those elements that ensure the storage and the transport. The generic objective is to reduce and narrow “the gap in vaccination rates” on a global scale, which the commission asks to tackle “quickly”. The more universalized the degree of protection, the fewer options for transmission of disease variants. Therefore, the commission urges to increase vaccination coverage.
One of the gaps in which the Congress body repairs affects the lack of information on the cost of vaccines “despite the public investment” made, according to the opinion. Therefore, it proposes an effort in transparency, or in other words, a reinforcement of the public-private mechanisms between states and pharmaceutical companies. Related to this, the signatory groups request a new vaccination information system that draws from the existing ones.
“Real time monitoring”
The document devotes a considerable part to the co-governance, the term coined by the president, Pedro Sánchez, shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic in Spain. The videoconference meetings with their regional counterparts were initially held on a weekly basis. Then they spaced out. During the long state of alarm, the end of 2020-the first four months of 2021, the conferences of presidents slowed down.
The commission glosses the leading role of the public health system, both at the state level and at the regional level. Coordination has been essential for the success of the inoculation in the population, it is reviewed. However, in the opinion the signatories advocate “ordinary measures of pharmacovigilance for the adequate control of an extraordinary vaccination campaign, by the AEMPS (the Spanish Medicines Agency), and of the possible adverse reactions to the vaccines”. The document adds that this pharmacovigilance should be complemented “through large databases of data from medical records so that that control is in real time“.
primary care
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The opinion shows numerous references to the autonomy of community health systems, proof of the influence in the text of groups such as ERC, PNV or EH Bildu. Thus, one of the recommendations defends that “in the face of future public health crises” the predominant model is that of “shared governance” between the Ministry and the ministries, based on respect for competence and “avoiding standardizing measures and attending to the singularities of each territory.
Primary care, in this line, must be strengthened. A Public Health Strategy would be a positive example in this regard. More research and more investment constitutes another recommendation, as well as advancing in an “institutional architecture” to design “a European Union of health”.