Bolivia Negotiates Acquisition of Covid-19 Vaccines with Five Companies

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Bolivia is negotiating with Pfizer, Moderna, Sinovac, Sinopharm and AstraZeneca the acquisition of vaccines against the coronavirus.

“There will be news in the following days”, assured the Vice Minister of Health System Management, Álvaro Terrazas, in a radio interview collected by the state agency ABI, in which he assured that they were negotiating with these companies on a bilateral basis.

According to Terrazas, two “safe” will enter the country and there will possibly be a third more and “even a fourth” if necessary to cover the vaccination needs in Bolivia.

Bolivia plans to begin vaccination against the coronavirus this January when the first batch of 6,000 Sputnik V vaccines arrives from Russia, as part of the acquisition of 5.2 million doses, which was announced last Wednesday, December 30th.

The purchase of the Russian vaccine has created controversy in the country, which for former President Evo Morales is “a disinformation campaign to discredit the vaccine,” as has been published on Twitter.

This Saturday the country has notified 1,070 new cases of coronavirus and 11 deaths from the disease in the last 24 hours, according to the newspaper “La Razón”. So far in the pandemic, the country has registered 162,055 infections and 9,816 deaths from coronavirus.

The intensive therapy units in the city of Santa Cruz, in eastern Bolivia, are almost at the limit of their occupation due to the outbreak of the pandemic that could reach its peak in the coming weeks, warned health authorities in that region.

“We have 98% saturation of our intensive care units at the beginning of this year 2021 (…). We are at the beginning of the regrowth escalation, we will surely have a peak in the next four to six weeks “, Carlos Hurtado, the Director of Epidemiology of the Departmental Health Service (Headquarters) of Santa Cruz, told the press.

The health authority also reported an increase in the requirements of immune plasma for the treatment of coronavirus, both in the Blood Bank and in social networks, for which it urged recovered patients to renew voluntary donations.

Plasma donations from those who overcame the disease were legally authorized in Bolivia in mid-2020.

The numbers of infections in Santa Cruz and La Paz are constantly rising, to the point that the authorities of both departments decreed partial quarantines during the New Year holiday.

Added to the concern about the saturation of intensive care units, there is the increase in the number of medical personnel infected with covid-19 and the lack of health personnel who have stopped working when their contracts expired at the end of the year.

“We need additional resources to face this regrowth”, Hurtado demanded, at a time when the central government and the departmental governments try to decide which one is responsible for taking over these contracts.

In La Paz, medical personnel whose contracts were not renewed demonstrated this Saturday demanding their rehiring in the face of the new emergency.

The Bolivian health authorities affirm that the spike in infections is mainly due to the failure of the inhabitants to comply with biosafety measures.