On Sunday, a shipment of Covax will arrive in Argentina with more than 800,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine

This Sunday very early, the shipment of vaccines will finally arrive in Argentina via the Covax solidarity mechanism coordinated by the United Nations. The national government has confirmed that 843,600 doses will arrive on the flight of the Dutch trading company KLM produced by the Anglo-Swedish laboratory AstraZeneca in collaboration with the University of Oxford.

The flight will be numbered KL701 and is expected to land at Ezeiza Airport at 6:15 a.m. from Amsterdam. It will come with 18,000 doses less than those announced Thursday, May 6 by the Minister of Health of the Nation, Carla Vizzotti, but it will also be a good sign for the party in power since this quantity of injectables will allow it to strengthen the national vaccination plan, which needs a strong boost because it works quite slowly. Vizzotti had expressed on this occasion that they would be in Buenos Aires this Friday May 21 and everything was delayed for two days.

The arrival of these vaccines will be in the context of a country that has been affected and with the extremely complex panorama of the pandemic: a second record wave of infections and mass deaths, the proliferation of new variants of the virus, a sanitary system on the verge of collapse and confinement for 9 days tending to restrict traffic as much as possible.

Once in the country, distributing vaccines to provinces will take time between 24 and 72 hours for logistical reasons.

Meanwhile, Casa Rosada officials anxiously awaited official confirmation from Russia this evening so that between Saturday and Monday, two more Aerolineas Argentinas flights could leave for Moscow to bring in a large shipment of Sputnik V vaccines manufactured by the Gamaleya Institute. They would come from component 1. During the coming week, the shipment of approximately 4 million doses of the purchase made from AstraZeneca of 22,429,842 million doses will also be released.

So far, the country has 8,607,701 people with a single dose applied, which represents about 19% of the population and 2,297,367 with both doses (about 5%).

This will be the third time that vaccines will arrive through this solidarity mechanism in which the government of Alberto Fernández reserved 9 million doses. They had arrived twice before: 218,000 doses on March 28 and another 864,000 on April 18.

“This is without a doubt the start of a new stage after all the efforts of the national government through different efforts to obtain vaccines and to continue to apply the first two doses and to complete the schedules,” said Vizzotti on May 6 at a press conference when he promised the arrival of these doses of Covax.

Vizzotti announced a few days later, on May 11, to his provincial government peers that by the end of the month, nearly 4 million AstraZeneca vaccines would arrive in Argentina. These are the corresponding shipments to the contract signed last year, on November 6, for the 22.4 million doses between the Argentine government and the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company, whose compliance has been delayed and has drawn criticism from the executive branch. The active principle of these doses was produced in Argentina by the laboratory mAbxience, belonging to the Insud group, of businessman Hugo Sigman.

President Alberto Fernández said during his European tour that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had promised to unblock the shipment of vaccines during the month of May. In this country, injections whose active principle is produced in a laboratory located in the province of Buenos Aires, in the city of Garín, are finished packaging. On Tuesday, the official confirmation took place in Buenos Aires during a meeting of the Federal Health Committee (COFESA).

The Minister of Health of the Nation indicated that if the schedule presented by the company is respected, in a short time it will be possible to vaccinate the priority target population at this stage since the jurisdictions have the capacity to do so. “This will change the course of the second wave of the pandemic in Argentina,” said Vizzotti and also claimed the joint project and the role of Argentina and Mexico to allow access to this vaccine in Latin America with a collaboration local in production.

Part of the shipment will be used to complete the immunization schedule for those who received doses of Covishield at the end of February. Argentina had signed a contract with the Serum Institute of India, which manufactures the same product as AstraZeneca under this trade name. The first shipment of 580,000 doses has been delivered but the second has not yet materialized as the government of this Asian country has temporarily banned the export of vaccines due to a sharp increase in deaths and infections. They will prioritize your vaccination before

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