Chile on Wednesday kicked off the mass vaccination process after the arrival of almost 4 million doses from the Chinese laboratory Sinovac and with a view to inoculating the population at risk – almost 5 million people – between February and March and the rest in the first semester. Chile had never before faced a challenge like this. What we had most managed to vaccinate was 8 million people, now we have proposed to practically double this goal,” acknowledged Chilean President Sebastian Pinera.
Mass inoculation starts with the population at risk, including health workers, the elderly, the chronically ill, and essential workers, and will go by stages and with specific days for each age range, with those over 90 years of age. the first. Once the risk group has been inoculated, it will be the turn of “most of the target population, that is, all people over 18 years of age, excluding groups such as pregnant women, who are approximately 15 million people”, Pinera explained.
The Government has enabled more than 1,400 vaccination points throughout the country, including the distant Easter Island (Pacific) and is the Municipal Stadium of La Florida, on the southern periphery of Santiago, the largest enclosure, where there are a hundred boxes and more than 3,000 people a day can be inoculated. I am very confident (in the vaccine), I am going to live to be 100 years old, even if I’m sitting down. I didn’t even feel the prick, Mrs. Leonila, over 90 years old, said at the exit of the stadium.
In the centers, to which those who want to vaccinate must voluntarily approach, not only the injection prepared by the Chinese Sinovac will be applied, but also that of Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca, the three vaccines currently approved in the country. Chile has committed more than 35 million vaccines, of which 10 million are from Pfizer-BioNTech, another 10 million from Sinovac, and the rest from AstraZeneca, Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), and the Covax platform, promoted by the World Organization of the Health (WHO) to guarantee universal access to the eventual vaccine.
Piñera, who is expected to be vaccinated next week, traveled to the town of Futrono, in the southern region of Los Ríos, to witness how a 93-year-old woman was inoculated.
“The beginning of this mass vaccination is something very important, but it does not mean that the pandemic is over. As we have said so many times, the pandemic will continue with us and we have to learn to live with it safely,” warned the leader. With more than 730,000 cases and 18,500 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic last March, Chile passed the first peak between July and July and is currently in the middle of the second wave, especially in the southern regions of the country, where more than fifty of localities are confined.
Santiago, where 7 million people live, was under strict quarantine for months and many neighborhoods still maintain home confinement on weekends and the closure of businesses that are not essential. We have set a goal for today of at least 80,000 vaccinated people,” said Health Minister Enrique Paris at a hospital center in the Chilean capital, who recalled that the vaccine is “free, voluntary, universal and safe “and that the second dose of Sinovac should be applied in 28 days.
Chile began vaccinating health workers working in intensive care units on December 24, when the first shipment of Pfizer / BioNTech arrived, and to date, more than 10,352 people have already received both doses. In July, the goal is to reach more than 70 percent of the country’s population, one of the most affected during the first wave of the pandemic in Latin America.
