Peruvian government has agreed to purchase 12 million more Pfizer vaccines

The Peruvian government on Wednesday signed the acquisition of 12 million Pfizer vaccines in addition to the 20 million to which it had previously subscribed, to add a total of 32 million doses of the vaccine developed by the American laboratory.

The new purchase was announced by the interim president of Peru, Francisco Sagasti, during the weekly meeting of the Council of Ministers, where the head of the Health portfolio, Oscar Ugarte, signed the acquisition contract.

The 12 million additional Pfizer vaccines will also be delivered before the end of the year, as will the rest of the vaccines from the same laboratory already purchased.

With this additional purchase, Sagasti pointed out that Peru already had 60 million vaccines insured against covid-19 before the end of 2021.

In addition to the doses of Pfizer, the Peruvian executive has also committed 14 million AstraZeneca vaccines and 13.3 million additional vaccines that will arrive through the multilateral Covax mechanism, created to ensure access to vaccines in developing countries.

“We continue to negotiate to get more vaccines for everyone. Create confidence and hope for all “, concluded Sagasti, whose administration has announced that it is about to enter into a purchase contract for the Russian vaccine Sputnik V.

Likewise, the Peruvian authorities work to unlock 37 million vaccines from Chinese state laboratory Sinopharm, which have been suspended for the time being after the irregular vaccination scandal was discovered and secretly by senior officials with a small batch sent for clinical testing of this vaccine in Peru.

So far, just over two million vaccines have arrived in the country, divided into one million from Sinopharm, over one million from Pfizer and 276,000 from AstraZeneca.

With them, last Friday, the first million vaccinated in Peru was reached, more than half of whom had already inoculated the two doses necessary to acquire protection against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Currently, the pandemic has caused more than 1.8 million confirmed cases in Peru, of which nearly 63,000 have died.

New cases of covid-19 in Peru still do not register variants from South Africa or India, since the Brazilian variant is predominant and some cases of the British variant are starting to appear, Ugarte said. “There is no indication that the Indian variant reached Peru, we hope not, although in this modern world we have the possibility of cross-migration,” the minister said in an interview with RPP News.

Ugarte added that the ministry is monitoring quite precisely and currently “The Brazilian variant has been the predominant one, English a very few cases and the South African so far none.” “We have no record of any case of the Indian variant,” he added.

The Brazilian variant was detected a few weeks ago in almost half of Peruvian territory, which has a large Amazon border with Brazil.

For its part, April was the deadliest month of the pandemic in the country with peaks of up to 9,000 infections and 4,000 deaths per day, although the executive said this week that the trend of the second wave is starting to s ‘reverse, while the vaccination campaign.

With information from EFE

KEEP READING: