Chile changes immunization plan amid unexpected problems

SANTIAGO, Chile.- Despite the success of his campaign, Chile has started prioritizing second doses of coronavirus vaccine, in a change of strategy which slows down new applications due to the slow supply and low protection of a single dose of Chinese Sinovac, the most widely used in the South American country.

The country has one of the main programs in the world, with over 13 million injections applied so far, but Monday thatthey had about two million left in their deposits, according to official figures.

Vaccination centers are operating with a weekly average of 153,000 daily vaccinations, well below March levels, while authorities they want to reach 15 million people and generate collective immunity by the middle of the year. This means vaccinating an additional 2.3 million people with a second dose of Sinovac or Pfizer, and inoculating an additional 7.3 million people.

However, in the last days, Vaccination centers in Santiago ran out of doses of both vaccines, according to witnesses, they therefore rejected patients seeking to be vaccinated or were asked to wait several hours until others arrive.

More than 200,000 Pfizer injections and a first batch of 800,000 AstraZeneca that Chile will receive from the Covax vaccine alliance are coming., as announced by the government. Beyond that, Chile is working on agreements to keep the availability of its open plan. The country has yet to receive an additional 700,000 doses of an order for 14.2 million from Sinovac’s CoronaVac, which helped fuel its mass inoculation campaign launched in February.

And just under eight million more are yet to arrive out of a supply of ten million agreed with Pfizer-BioNtech. According to the government, most of them will be delivered before the end of September, with no exact delivery date.

Health Minister Enrique Paris said the country was following a strict vaccination schedule, based on age groups, to ensure it did not run out of supplies. “I think you have to stay calm. We have a lot of deals, with a lot of companies and the vaccines will keep coming, ”said Paris.

Chile, which vaccinated up to 430,000 people per day in March, reached 50.9% of the target population of 15 million people with the first dose and 35.6% with both. However, the country was marred by a second wave of the virus which arrived in March with the end of the summer holidays and the most contagious variants of Britain and Brazil. The capital and other regions are under strict quarantine, with around 7,000 cases per day.

Unlike countries that are widening the gap between the first and second dose to provide protection to more people, Paris said Chile will now prioritize the administration of the second dose over the first.

The country aims to administer 760,000 this week, due to evidence that a single dose of Sinovac has provided little protection.

Chile last week published its own analysis of the effectiveness of Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine in its population, which showed effectiveness in the first dose of only 16% against infection and 36% in preventing hospitalization. “If we do not place the second dose, the situation will be much more serious”, the noted analysis.

Reuters