It seems impossible that attention to the vaccination campaign will yield to interest. The latest controversy that arose this week has to do with each of its vials. Without the appropriate syringes, in many autonomous communities it is only possible to take advantage of five doses of the medicine. The curious thing is that the ideal needles for this essential task are manufactured in Fraga, a municipality of Huesca with 15,000 inhabitants.
To take full advantage of Pfizer’s antidote against covid-19, it needs to be aspirated from the vials with a low “dead volume” needle, which does not retain air or leave excess fluid. Thus, in territories such as Andalusia, Madrid or Catalonia, where conventional syringes are not being used, almost 17% of the distributed vaccines are being discarded.
Curiously, and contrary to what happened at the outbreak of the pandemic with hydroalcoholic gel, masks or respirators, all of them products that were not manufactured in our country, the needles recommended by the pharmaceutical company that has produced the vaccine They have been produced in Fraga since 1986. There, a plant belonging to the North American multinational Becton Dickinson, which employs 600 people, has already manufactured 500 million units of these low “dead volume” needles for . In Spain, only 25 million of this item have been acquired.
The US, Canada and the United Kingdom have been its main clients, according to El Heraldo de Aragón. This newspaper accentuates the contradiction in its own territory: not even Aragon vaccinates with these syringes, but rather with ones made in Italy by the Nacatur company. The regional government alleges “purely technical” reasons.
The Fraga plant, along with another located in San Agustín de Guadalix (Madrid), lead the production of Becton Dickinson medical technology instruments worldwide. The high demand for these syringes arising from the vaccination campaign launched in most countries of the world has forced an investment of 1.5 million euros in the Fraga factory in order to increase capacity and meet orders.
Its needles have already been used in other global vaccination campaigns, such as the one that arose as a result of the H1N1 virus crisis (avian flu) or swine flu in Europe. Entities such as Unicef or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also regularly resort to them in their health projects in underdeveloped countries.
Becton Dickinson offices in the USA. Image: Alamy.
The multinational Becton Dickinson, founded in 1897, settled in Spain at the end of the 1970s, and in 1986 it acquired Fabersanitas Industrial, a syringe factory located in the aforementioned municipality of Huesca, 25 kilometers from Lérida.
Having the right instruments for the development of the drug now becomes an essential issue, especially after the European Medicines Agency authorized aa to change the leaflet of its antidote and it was officially registered that each vial contains six doses, and not all five. that he communicated at the beginning. If before it was a debate between waste and greater efficiency in vaccination, now it translates into a problem of administering a smaller number of vaccines: , not by vials, so that, from now on, your shipments will include fewer of vials. The autonomous communities – and their purchase of sanitary material – will be responsible for extracting the purchased doses from them, and not 17% less.
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