Chile has reached two million vaccinated and leads the region

With two million vaccinated in nine working days reached on Monday, Chile leads vaccination efforts in Latin America.

“We have managed to vaccinate over two million compatriots, which places us in a position of privilege and leadership not only in Latin America, (but) around the world», Declared President Sebastián Piñera.

“This vaccination campaign is part of a very old tradition that Chile has,” said the Minister of Health, Enrique Paris, during his vaccination on Friday in his age group, 72 years, paying tribute to key personalities of health setup. system like former president Salvador Allende.

About a million people vaccinated are older adults. Thursday of last week, more than 270,000 people were vaccinated – more than 1% of the population, out of 19 million – and this Monday teachers began to be vaccinated.

“I’m convinced it’s a good vaccine,” Karol López, 90, said a few days ago at a vaccination center in Santiago, who said he suffered “Isolation and lack of opportunities to do the things you usually have to do“As a result of the pandemic. Her accompanying son breathed easier after his father was vaccinated and said he had “hope” that the vaccination will allow everyone to regain their lives and obtain community immunity as quickly as possible. .

In Chile, vaccination is voluntary and free and the massive process was carried out with the Chinese Sinovac vaccine.

We consider that the vaccination process “has been very successful, we hope that it will continue in an orderly manner and on schedule”, admitted at the time the president of the faculty of medicine, Izkia Siches, who criticized the government and its management of the pandemic.

“The vaccination rate is very good, that doesn’t surprise me. Chile has shown that it has the capacity to complete massive vaccination processes in a short period of time. An example was the flu vaccination process in 2020, ”Sebastián Reyes, doctor of microbiology, immunologist and researcher at the U. Mayor Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, told AP.

In addition to the strong primary care network, municipalities are another key entity. “He had relevant actors as the government also collaborated with the municipalities and the mass vaccination process made it possible that the towns did not develop, which would be a big problem and counterproductive”, explains the expert, highlighting the fact of “having multiple places to vaccinate”, such as outdoor schools, stadiums, universities, parking lots and shopping malls for car vaccination.

“For the private sector to join together to support the vaccination process and to be effective, it is very good, it must be a collective effort”, declares the expert.

“There is a union in different cases to carry out the vaccination process, confidence in the process also increased“. According to the specialist, the latest surveys indicate that more than 65% of people are ready to be vaccinated.

On the same Monday, the mass vaccination of teachers began with a view to resuming face-to-face lessons in March. Teachers and union leaders criticized the decision and said they refused to return to class until teachers received their second dose of China’s Sinovac vaccine.

Vaccination started with teachers and educational assistants over 60 and a week ahead of the original schedule set by the Ministry of Health, which delayed inoculation of chronically ill patients during the same period.. In the following days, the age will decrease until the vaccination of the 513,000 people who work in the education of children and adolescents is completed.

“Today, being vaccinated and starting with (massive) vaccination, a ray of hope opens for us, that we will see each other again at an appropriate time with our children,” said Gloria Alfaro, an early childhood educator became the first teacher to be vaccinated.

Arrival of 6 million doses of Sinovac vaccines at the end of February – and 3 million more in MarchAccording to Paris, it would be essential to maintain care measures and achieve the government’s ambitious goal of vaccinating 5 million Chileans in March and 15 million by the end of June.

However, some experts have warned that because it is a less effective vaccine than others, it would take more than 80% of the population to achieve herd immunity.

Chile has contracts with Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinovac, Oxford / AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson and is negotiating to bring the Sputnik V vaccine. In total, it has nearly 40 million doses already committed by 2021.

For many, the vaccination campaign is the Piñera government’s first and only resounding success in the entire pandemic and the social explosion, something that could capitalize in view of the presidential elections in November.

On Monday, a poll was released that placed the president with the greatest popularity for several months.

For political analyst German Silva, the success of the process could be attributed to the government and improve the general perception of it, rather than to the president himself. “There isn’t much that has increased (in popularity) when you consider he’s on vacation and been out pretty much every day related to the vaccine.”

With AP information

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