translated from Spanish: Municipalities in Brazil deny inoculating expired doses against Covid-19

The municipalities of several cities in Brazil have denied having inoculated doses against Covid-19 that were already expired, according to the local newspaper ‘Folha de Sao Paulo’ based on official records of the Brazilian Ministry of Health. Official data from the Brazilian Government indicate that at least 26,000 people have received expired doses of the dose of AstraZeneca, all related to an eight batch of the vaccine, according to the newspaper ‘Globo’. Thus, in response to this information, different municipalities of Brazilian cities have denied this information on Friday. Specifically, the city of Maringá would be the most affected, with 3,536 expired roads, but its Consistory has denied it on Twitter and has alleged that it is “an error in the (computer) system” that has been in charge of the records. However, ‘Globo’ reports that at least one city, Aloga Grande, has admitted to having applied 72 expired doses, to which the Integrated Monitoring Office of the COVID-19 Epidemic has requested the Ministry of Health an investigation in this regard. The Secretary of Health of Maringá, Marcelo Puzzi, has stressed that the date that appears in the ‘Conect SUS System’, in which the registration of the inoculated vials is carried out, is different from the actual day of the application of the doses. Maringá has been joined by other cities, such as São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Belém do Pará, Manaus, Salvador and Recife, which have also publicly expressed their rejection of the information and defend not having applied vaccines outside the established deadline. For these reasons, the National Council of Secretaries of Health and the competent body in this matter at the municipal level have prepared a joint note in which they assure that “all cases will be investigated” and that “an error in the Information System of the National Immunization Program is not ruled out”.

Original source in Spanish