Uruguay to vaccinate migrants and refugee applicants against Covid-19

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Uruguay will vaccinate migrants, and asylum seekers against Covid-19, the country’s Ministry of Public Health (MSP) announced on Tuesday, June 22.

In a statement released today, the ministry informed that those people who are in Uruguayan territory “for a period of more than 90 days (the limit established for tourists) and have not previously initiated a residency procedure” will be able to register for the vaccine.

As the note also points out, “the approval of this request does not imply the immediate allocation of a quota with date and time for a vaccinator, but the confirmation that they are in a position to enter their data into the Covid-19 vaccination schedule system, as the rest of the population does.”

The Minister of Public Health, Daniel Salinas, also referred to this matter in his official Twitter account, in which he wrote that this process is the result of a joint work between his portfolio, the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry and the National Directorate of Migration, corresponding to the Ministry of the Interior.

The head of the MSP highlighted that “foreigners who have settled in Uruguay and do not yet have Uruguayan identity cards” may be inoculated “with the same criteria of the type of vaccine according to age group.”

Uruguay began its vaccination process on March 1 with doses from the Chinese Sinovac and U.S. Pfizer laboratories, later joined by those of the Anglo-Swedish AstraZeneca, which arrived as part of the Covax mechanism of the World Health Organization.

The gradual arrival of doses from Pfizer initially intended for health personnel and people over 70 years of age delayed starting the process for these groups.

The priority groups were teachers, firefighters, police officers, military personnel, and the Institute for Children and Adolescents staff, which were later joined by groups of citizens according to their age.

Uruguay has been a pioneer in inoculating the prison population, street population, or, recently, adolescents to favor incorporating face-to-face education when they return from the winter vacations, in mid-July.

According to the web monitor developed by the MSP, at 9:33 PM (12.33 GMT) this Tuesday, 1,419,294 people, or 40.11% of the population, had completed the vaccination schedule while 730,005 are waiting for the second dose.

Since March 13, 2020, when a health emergency was declared in Uruguay due to the detection of the first four positive cases, the South American country has registered 356,382 total cases, of which 24,195 are active, and 5,316 deaths, of which more than 4,000 occurred since April this year.