According to the statement, all children from one month of birth and up to two years, 11 months and 29 days of age will be immunized, in the two planned phases, and the nine-year-olds will be reactivated with a dose.

The first stage of the campaign will take place between Monday, March 14 and Saturday, March 19, 2022, with a recovery week from March 21 to 26 for infants who could not be vaccinated in the scheduled period, the statement added. .

The second group will run between Monday, May 16 to Saturday May 21, and the recovery week is scheduled to take place between May 23 and 28.

According to the MINSAP, the process will be carried out simultaneously throughout the nation.

Every year, for six decades, the island has immunized its population against polio thanks to a national campaign that not even the Covid-19 pandemic managed to interrupt.

Just at the end of February, the Pan American Health Organization asked the countries of the Americas to redouble efforts to protect children against this disease, whose vaccination rate, in a three-dose schedule, was 82 percent in 2020, the lowest since 1994.

The agency stated that if immunization coverage is less than 95 percent in each municipality and community, polio can cause paralytic disease and return to the region.

In 2020, 12 countries reported coverage of less than 80 percent for the third dose of the vaccine, he noted.

Poliomyelitis is a highly infectious disease caused by the poliovirus, that can affect the nervous system and cause paralysis in the legs or arms.

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