Chicken pox jabs still some time off

ALTHOUGH a free chicken pox vaccination for one-year-olds was announced last week, it seems it will still take a good few months to become a reality.
Health Minister Alfonso Alonso, who had announced the new measure, has now explained that he will not be calling a meeting of regional health departments to have vaccination calendars adapted until all the new regional governments have been sworn in, which could take quite a while. And in the meantime the vaccinations will not be available from chemists either.
At the moment, the vaccination is only given free of charge to children who reach the age of 12 without catching the illness, and former Health Minister Ana Mato had them removed from chemists to stop parents buying them over the counter themselves.
This led to some parents, following doctors’ recommendations, to travel to Andorra, France and Portugal to buy the vaccinations for their offspring.
Although parents will still have to wait a while, Alonso declared that the measure to include the vaccination for children between 12 and 15 months was a reasonable one that had the approval of both the Spanish Paediatricians Association and the Spanish Vaccinology Association.

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