According to the president of Infarmed, Rui Santos Ivo, speaking at a press conference at the headquarters of this entity in Lisbon on the start of the autumn vaccination campaign against influenza and Covid-19, Portugal receives this week the first doses of the new adapted vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, in which they are expecting about 500 thousand doses of one of the approved vaccines and about 100 thousand of the other.

The adapted vaccines approved so far by the European Medicines Agency are those of the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna, both with messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.

"The autumn vaccination campaign is aimed at around three million people, who will be called upon to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and against influenza. It starts next Wednesday, 7 September, and is expected to end on 17 December", said Colonel Penha-Gonçalves, vaccination campaign coordinator.

The vaccination coordinator also said that the first to be called for vaccination will be the over-80s with comorbidities, whose call process started on 2 September, and that the campaign will run "in a staggered way", by age groups, moving forward as schedules in the previous age group are completed.

"This autumn campaign we will focus on the over-60s age group and the at-risk groups. To execute this campaign we established a plan that has a weekly scheduling capacity of around 280,000 people, distributed throughout the country in 397 vaccination points, two thirds of which are located in health centres and one third in vaccination centres," said the official.

According to Penha-Gonçalves, Portugal will receive the first doses on 6 September and vaccination will start "in limited locations" on 7 September, in about a dozen vaccination points from north to south of the country, "then generalising the process to the entire device on Thursday", on 8 September .

Still on this campaign, the coordinator said that vaccination against influenza and against Covid-19 will occur "preferably in co-administration", but in these three months the device foresees to continue to do primary vaccination and paediatric vaccination against Covid-19, for those who have not yet completed the vaccination schemes.