Valeriu Gheorghita announced the application of a last-minute measure in Romania in full wave 4 of unprecedented infections for our country, but also with a shocking number of deaths, so that in order to increase Romanians' confidence in vaccination, the expiration date will be reprinted on the certificates their's.
Valeriu Gheorghita says that this decision was taken following the appearance of false information according to which people with expired vaccine doses were vaccinated in a city in Romania, stating that this would not be real, and the measure is taken for to increase people's confidence.
"And the others, approximately 200.000 doses, 230.000 doses that were at -80 degrees, have the validity period extended by three months, so that, at the moment, in Romania, all the doses received from the BioNTech/Pfizer company that have been permanently stored at -80 degrees have an expiration date of the end of December at the earliest.
Moreover, we will reprint the expiration date again on the vaccination certificate, on the certificate. When the third dose was introduced on the vaccination certificate, considering that in the first stage there was a lot of confusion, the population understood that the expiry date means the date of the expiry of the vaccine protection or the expiry date of the certificate, I considered that maybe it is no longer useful to print this vaccine lot expiration date.
We have returned to this decision and it will be reprinted on the certificate in the coming days, so that for each individual batch there is this expiry date, so that people know as clearly as possible that it is not about vaccination with vaccines that are expired. I repeat, this decision of the European Medicines Agency is one that applies to all EU countries and that targets both the vaccines produced since September 10 and those that have already been received.
We know, moreover, that there have been similar decisions, based on stability studies, when, for example, initially the vaccine from the company BioNTech/Pfizer was kept at room temperature, two degrees, for five days. Later, stability studies allowed this period to be extended to 30 days, precisely because scientific data showed the maintenance of the properties of the vaccine. These are, at the moment, the data related to this variation of extending the period of validity."
