The pilot begins for the closure of the massive vaccination phase against covid-19

The Ministry of Health announced that this Monday, April 18, the pilot for the closure of the mass phase of vaccination against covid-19 began in Bogotá, which means the dismantling of 1,170 exclusive immunization points against the disease causing the pandemic.

The Government maintained that the verification of the refrigerators installed and the counting of the doses delivered to the vaccinating IPS, the amount received and those applied, the Paiweb records and the consolidation of the accounts will be carried out. The process will be accompanied by the Office of the Attorney General and the Superintendency of Health.

This new phase of the National Vaccination Plan will feature 4,200 points of the Expanded Immunization Plan.

“We come from a model where we adopted the processes that came from the EPI, but we adopted next door an operational structure where nearly 84 million vaccines against covid-19 have been applied. It is already necessary to move to an institutionalized phase where the covid-19 application operation is integrated into the regular vaccination program,” said the Minister of Health, Fernando Ruiz.

He explained that there are human resources that are working and “this would not be another EPI vaccine, but a vaccination process integrated with the same resources as the regular program.”

In order to develop the closure, there must be four very important stages with a territorial component.

The first thing is to make a record of the doses sent, “we will send teams from Minsalud with the Superintendency of Health to check how many were sent, how many are in the warehouses, how many were delivered to municipalities and are in the refrigerators, and how many are already applied. This will serve to validate the accounts, which is the second point, the verification of the counts,” explained Minister Ruiz Gómez.

The third thing in this closure, he stressed, is the charging of missing vaccines to PAIWEB, and the fourth will be the reconciliation of IPS accounts in terms of advances generated such as the closure of the legalization of the billing process and the payment of applied vaccines.

Another announcement by the head of the Health portfolio was the publication for comments on the Minsalud website the routes of care that are very relevant.

For his part, Germán Escobar Morales, Deputy Minister of Public Health and Service Delivery, assured that the change “does not mean that vaccination against covid-19 will be stopped, but that it will be integrated with the regular program and its resources, such as vaccination points and staff, will be used.”

In line with this, it was detailed in the last Unified Command Post that of the nearly 1,700 points established for covid-19 vaccination nationwide, the more than 4,000 established for the EPI in the country will be reached.

However, this announcement does not mean that the covid-19 vaccine is incorporated into the regular program, which has 21 biologics, considering “that evidence and a review process are required to take that step. The announced decision corresponds to an effort as a country to take a next step that also involves taking stock of what these 13 months of mass vaccination were like.”

The EPI in Colombia is a consolidated program that provided the basis for the construction of the National Vaccination Plan and, historically, has been recognized and awarded as one of the best in the Americas. In this sense, this decision “provides confidence in our human talent in health, but it also poses a major challenge for territorial entities in not letting down their guard with covid-19,” Escobar said.

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