The Ministry of Health foresees a national multi-vaccination campaign for the second half of this year, in an attempt to recover vaccination coverage throughout the country, especially among children. The calendar is being agreed with states and municipalities. Immunization, however, will be brought forward to May in Acre and Amazonas, due to a recent case of polio on the border with Peru. 
The director of the Department of Immunizations and Vaccine-preventable Diseases of the Ministry of Health, Éder Gatti, said, this Wednesday (26), in Brasília, that, “due to this epidemiological scenario, we will advance multivaccination in two states: Acre and Amazonas, for the month of May. (It is) to recover vaccination coverage there and not run the risk of introducing polio across the border, a disease that we no longer see in national territory. We are already negotiating with these two states. We will start in May”.
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In a public hearing at the Health Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, Éder recalled that, since 2016, Brazil has recorded progressive declines in virtually all doses of the National Immunization Program (PNI). “We closed the year 2022 with the worst vaccination coverage indicators. Practically all vaccines that are offered to our children register low coverage. This is a problem ”he opined.
“We recently identified a poliovirus with pathogenic characteristics on the border with Peru and the states of Amazonas and Acre. We had the identification of suspected cases of diphtheria on the border between Roraima and Venezuela,” he added.
“We have an epizootic of yellow fever in Rio Grande do Norte. We have yellow fever in humans in Bolivia, bordering Mato Grosso do Sul. This opens up a very dangerous scenario because, while we have the risk of introducing these diseases into our territory, our vaccination coverage is low,” he said.
robust program
During the hearing, the director analyzed the PNI, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, as a robust, strong program that has gained recognition over the last few decades.
“We consolidated our program throughout the 1980s and 1990s and eliminated diseases such as polio, measles, diphtheria and whooping cough. We made several diseases, which mainly attacked children, reduce the incidence significantly, ”he said.
“We made a very important reflection on what happened with covid-19, but now we need to look at the routine. For this, we need to adjust the information systems that record applied doses, something that is very disorganized and needs to be adjusted so that the data have better quality. We need to organize our stocks and, from there, we will carry out a national multivaccination campaign,” he stressed.
Finally, Éder Gatti said that “multivaccination will have to work in a logic of expanding access, that is, we will need to diversify vaccination strategies. We will apply the logic of microplanning in states and municipalities, something idealized by the World Health Organization (WHO), and we will need to diversify strategies, make the vaccine go to the population and not just wait for the population to go to the vaccine. For this, we will need to carry out vaccination in schools, extramural vaccination (reaching users who are often unable to go to a health unit).”
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