'Turkey could inoculate a million people per day if it had enough vaccines'

Photo: Polina Tankilevitch / Pexels

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Minister of Health Fahrettin Koca said yesterday (April 15) that everyone over the age of 40 would be vaccinated by the end of June.

We have talked about whether this is possible, the country's vaccination capacity and the impact of anti-vaccination campaigns with İstanbul Medical Chamber Chair Prof. Pınar Saip.

Currently, people over the age of 60 and people with a chronic disease are vaccinated. To what the minister said to come true, 20 million people need to be vaccinated in the next one-and-a-half months, Saip noted.

"It's possible but we need vaccines"

"We consider people who received the second those vaccinated, so 40 million vaccine doses are needed for the vaccination of 20 million people," she noted. "It's possible to vaccinate people like the minister said but we need to have vaccines for this."

"Unfortunately, the daily number of vaccinations is currently around 120,000. This process can be accelerated but vaccines need to be delivered quickly for this.

"Rapid vaccination is possible as long as a variety of vaccines are provided and the necessary doses of vaccines are delivered."

Turkey has mostly relied on China's SinoVac company for vaccines while it has also procured four million doses of Pfizer's BioNTech.

As of today, 7.7 million people have been administered two vaccine doses and 12 million people received the first dose in the country of 83 million people. Turkey started its mass vaccination campaign in early January.

Vaccination and new variants

While Turkey's healthcare infrastructure has the capacity to vaccinate a million people daily, only eight percent of the population has been vaccinated so far.

"All segments of the public should raise the demand for vaccination. Also, we should calculate the population as at least 90 million because refugees also need to be vaccinated

"Therefore, at least 70 million people need to be vaccinated to ensure community immunity. For this, there should be 140 million vaccine doses."

About the vaccination and new coronavirus variants, Saip said, "We will see to what extent the variants have an effect over time. However, the longer the vaccination is delayed, the more variants will emerge. Vaccination should be done very rapidly to slow down the spread among the public

The "wasted" vaccines

About the claims that some vaccine doses were "wasted" after people didn't show up for an appointment, which Minister Koca denied, Saip said that the required precautionary measures are generally taken at vaccination centers.

"It is possible to take simple precautions to avoid wasting, this process can be organized," she said.

The storage conditions of BioNTech vaccines, which are produced with mRNA technology, are more complicated than the traditional Sinovac vaccine. It needs to be stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius and unfreezes at minus 20 degrees, at which it can be stored for six hours.

A bottle of BioNTech vaccines six doses. So, if the six people aren't vaccinated after the bottle is opened, the vaccines may go to waste.

SinoVac, on the other hand, is stored at between 2 to 8 degrees as other traditional vaccines.

Anti-vaccination campaigns

The health minister said that 14 percent of health workers and nearly 25 percent of those over the age of 65 hadn't been vaccinated and the ministry would set up teams that would visit people at home to convince them to get vaccinated.

For the elderly, it was not because of anti-vaccination but of the fact that the appointments are arranged online, said Saip adding that she hadn't observed a high level of anti-vaccination among the public.

"However, there is mistrust the ministry created itself. The management of the process and the lack of transparency may have caused confusion," she said.

About Prof. Pınar Saip

Internal diseases and medical oncology specialist. Lecturer at İstanbul University Oncology Institute's Medical Oncology Department. The chair of the Turkish Medical Oncology Association (2012-2014). İstanbul University Faculty of Medicine Ethical Committee member. Turkish Medical Association Centel Delegate (2916-2018). İstanbul Medical Chamber Chair (2018-...).

(AS/VK)