After a significant increase in the number of cases between December and January 2021, the Brazilian Association of Vaccine Clinics is concerned about the amount of vaccine doses that will be made available by industry for this year’s campaign.
As they prepare for the start of the flu vaccination campaign, private vaccination clinics are concerned about the low quantity of doses made available by the industry to serve this market. According to the Brazilian Association of Vaccine Clinics (ABCVAC), after the increase in the number of flu cases registered at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, an increased demand in the clinics is expected. This, together with the fact that the Ministry of Health has excluded children over the age of five from the priority groups for the flu vaccination campaign, allows the lack of sufficient vaccines to meet the possible demand that there will be. on the market.
This scenario suggests that the demand for vaccination throughout this campaign in the private network is greater. In particular because the Influenza virus, which causes the disease, has a seasonal characteristic: it circulates throughout the year, in different regions of the world, with a predominance in the autumn and winter months, the period preceding the countryside.
Geraldo Barbosa, president of ABCVAC, explains that the concern about the flu campaign is greater because it is the flagship of the private vaccine market, however, this scenario of scarcity of vaccinations also occurs with other vaccines.
“The potential private vaccine sector represents 7-10% of the Brazilian population for all vaccines. However, the industry provides doses to serve approximately 3% of this population, leaving the market unattended, particularly due to the zero risk work policy. In addition, 90% of what is offered to the private network is concentrated in a small group of large companies,” Barbosa points out.
The private network launches the annual flu vaccination campaign around the last week of March. In 2021, clinics were responsible for administering about 8.5 million doses, up from more than 7 million in 2020. This year, they will be about 8 million.
Vaccination against influenza considerably reduces the risk of contamination as well as the risk of complications related to infection, hospitalizations and evolution towards death. In the private network, everyone from 6 months can be vaccinated, if they have no medical contraindications and it offers even greater protection, containing two subtypes of influenza A and two others under -types of influenza B. The vaccine from the public network is the trivalent and contains two subtypes of influenza A and one subtype of influenza B.
The value of the doses varies between R$120 and R$160 throughout Brazil.
