Argentina exceeds 15 million vaccine doses received against Covid-19

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Argentina has received so far, from several international suppliers, more than 15 million vaccine doses against Covid-19, of which 8,878,491 first doses have already been applied, 19.38 % of the population, and 2,452,575 second doses, 5.35 %, official sources informed this Wednesday.

The last batch received this morning came from Amsterdam with 657,600 vaccines developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, which are part of the COVAX mechanism of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Also, a new Aerolíneas Argentinas flight is expected to arrive from Moscow in the afternoon with doses of the Russian Sputnik-V, the main vaccine being administered in the country and the only one that requires two different components for the first and second doses.

With these last two arrivals, Argentina will have surpassed 15 million vaccines received since last December. There are also batches of the Chinese Sinopharm and Covishield produced in India with AstraZeneca technology.

THE FIRST VACCINES PRODUCED IN ARGENTINA

This Wednesday, 804,000 AstraZeneca doses arrived Monday from Miami (USA) and are part of the first batch of vaccines whose active ingredient was produced in Argentina based on a contract signed at the end of 2020 between the Government and the laboratory, to receive a total of 22.4 million doses, will begin to be distributed throughout the country.

The vaccines are produced in Argentina and packaged in Mexico under an agreement signed between the two countries, with the support of the Carlos Slim Foundation, for joint production.

This will allow, according to what the Argentine President, Alberto Fernández, said this Monday in a joint videoconference with his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, that Mexicans and Argentines, “who joined forces and worked together”, will be able to have vaccines, but also for the rest of Latin America.

“Latin America united is invincible, it is capable of generating the solutions it needs for its people to live better and cope better with such a pandemic,” he said.

MORE THAN 75,000 DEATHS

By population groups, 6,456,893 people aged 60 and over have been vaccinated so far, followed by health personnel (2,210,461), people aged 18 to 59 with risk factors (1,336,003), strategic personnel -security and armed forces, teachers, or those responsible for the functioning of the State- (1,310,944) and other categories (16,765).

Since last Saturday, a large part of Argentina, considered high sanitary risk, has been under total confinement, which will last until May 31.

The Government took the decision considering that the country is at the worst moment of the pandemic. It is necessary to reduce the number of infections to avoid the collapse of hospitals, which in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, the most populated and most affected by the virus, have their intensive care beds at 76.2 % of their capacity.

According to the latest official data, 75,056 people have died of the coronavirus – 576 in the last 24 hours – and of the 3,586,736 people who have tested positive since the first case was detected, 354,020 are still suffering from the disease.

CONTROVERSY WITH THE OPPOSITION

Last Monday, Fernández announced that he would initiate legal action against the president of the opposition Republican Proposal party, Patricia Bullrich, after she accused the former Minister of Health, Gines Gonzalez Garcia, of having asked for “an economic return” to the American Pfizer to sign the contract to acquire vaccines.

“I have instructed my lawyers that next Monday, they will initiate the pertinent legal actions against whoever has launched such a shameful defamation,” said the president.

Pfizer itself issued a statement in which it denied having received “requests for undue payments”.

On the subject, former President Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) of Bullrich’s party referred to the vaccine issue in an interview with CNN on Tuesday night.

“Having been the country that made the most important clinical trials of the country in the world, more than 5,000 Argentines went through those trials, gave us the right to buy 13 million vaccines, and this government did not buy them,” he criticized.