Argentina will receive 1.9 million vaccines from the Covax initiative through May

Covax, the multinational body created for the equitable distribution of covid-19 vaccines, will send 1,944,000 doses of vaccines against the coronavirus in Argentina until May of this year. The figure is far removed from the nine million doses that the government had announced it would receive from this organization for the period February-July 2021.

In February, the multilateral organization indicated that in the first half of the year 2.2 million doses would reach the country.

The news comes in a context where the production of vaccines against the coronavirus around the world is suffering delays and the deadlines initially announced by the laboratories are currently being revised.

The vaccines that will reach the country via Covax will be those developed by the University of Oxford in collaboration with the AstraZeneca laboratory And they will come from the Serum Institute, in India, the one in charge of their manufacture. The Covishields have the same origin, which have been applied in the country since February.

The news was known through a statement from Covax. The document also details that this week the the delivery time, divided into two two-month periods: February-March and April-May. From the Presidency of the Nation, they indicated that they are still waiting to receive the schedule in a contract to be able to determine the date of arrival of the first batch.

The shipment that will arrive in the country is part of a first distribution of vaccines from the Covax initiative in which they will be distributed 237 million doses of Oxford / AstraZeneca plus vaccine 1.2 million Pfizer / BioNTech dose rate.

In this first phase, all countries will receive doses to vaccinate between 2.2 and 2.6% of their population. The only exceptions are Small Island Developing States which, due to their size, will receive 16-20% of their population due to the high logistical cost of delivering small quantities.

Among the countries with the most doses allocated during this first round of childbirth, stand out Pakistan (14.6 million doses), Nigeria (13.6 million), Indonesia (11.7 million) and Bangladesh (10.9 million).

And among American nations, the biggest beneficiaries will be Brazil (9.1 million doses), Mexico (5.5 million), Colombia (2.2 million), Argentina (1.9 million), Canada (1.6 million), Peru (1.4 million), Bolivia (764,430) and Ecuador (756 000).

Covax – co-led by the Gavi Alliance for Vaccines, the Coalition to Promote Innovations for Epidemic Preparedness and WHO – anticipates delivery of up to 337.2 million AstraZeneca and Pfizer / BioNTech vaccines during the first semester of the year, of which 35 million would go to Latin American countries.

With more than 50 million confirmed cases and more than 1.2 million deaths, the countries of the Americas will need to immunize an estimated 700 million people to control the pandemic.

A few days after a year after the detection of the first case in the region, Colombia yesterday became the first country in the region to receive COVID-19 vaccines (117,000 doses) via COVAX.

Peru, El Salvador and Bolivia are now expected to receive vaccines from Pfizer / BioNTech as part of COVAX’s “First Wave” initiative. Countries need to finalize administrative, legal and regulatory requirements to move the process forward.

For Argentina, the 1,944,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine allocated are barely a quarter of a game that the government promised in January.

LGP / DD