Preparations to vaccinate Balearic population within three months

In parliament on Tuesday, the president said that the principal difficulty with the vaccination programme is "the lack of production", which is why she has called on pharmaceutical companies to speed it up. If doses of vaccines arrive "en masse", the region will be prepared to vaccinate very rapidly, as the infrastructure for this is already being prepared.

Spokesperson for Ciudadanos, Patricia Guasp, told the president that this will not be possible. "There are not the people to carry out mass vaccination with only personnel from the public health system." Guasp criticised Armengol's PSOE party for having followed Podemos in "demonising private health" by supporting a motion that only IB-Salut personnel should carry out vaccination.

Guasp added that "while the doses do not arrive, the hospital pressure continues to increase as does the fatigue of Balearic society". She demanded the immediate resignations or dismissals of "VIPs who have jumped the vaccination queue" and wanted to know who draws up the lists of those to be vaccinated and what the government is doing "to prevent the fraudulent use of vaccines".

Lina Pons of El Pi restated the need for the Balearics to be a strategic area for vaccination because of the loss of tourism due to the pandemic. She wanted the health minister, Patricia Gómez, to state when 70% of the population will be vaccinated.

Gómez explained that the government's strategy is to have many distribution points in order to have very high vaccination when this will be possible. "In three months we could vaccinate the people, but it is necessary that the vaccines are delivered. In the meantime, we will continue to prepare. The arrival of new vaccines and the approval of AstraZenezca means higher numbers of doses than originally planned. A year ago, no one could have imagined that by this time we would already have vaccinated more than 26,000 people."