The first vaccines of the Covax mechanism have arrived in Colombia

The first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine from the multilateral Covax mechanism in the Western Hemisphere landed aboard a DHL plane at around 1:10 p.m. on Monday. at El Dorado airport in Bogotá. The batch contains 177,000 biological products developed by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, which are part of the 20 million that Colombia will receive thanks to this strategy.

The country becomes the second in a group of 18 priority countries to receive the allocation through this mechanism, after Ghana (Africa) received 600,000 doses from pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca last week.

“Many people around the world have doubted the effectiveness of this tool, fake news and comments of all kinds have been seen. Today, it is corroborated, not only that Covax is active, that it works, but that this distribution also begins in the different latitudes of the world ”, declared the president Iván Duque after the arrival of the vaccines in Bogotá.

The President of the Republic, Iván Duque, confirmed last Friday, February 26, the first delivery of vaccines via Covax which will arrive in the country on March 1, with the first 177,000 doses.

Organic products sent to the country They are from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, which has already sent 100,000 additional doses to the national territory. acquired through bilateral agreements independent of the international mechanism founded by the World Health Organization for equitable access to alternatives against covid-19.

According to statements collected by the newspaper El Tiempo, Duque took advantage of the announcement to refer to those who made comments against the said international mechanism, noting that “a those who said that Covax was useless, that it was not real and that it was an illusion, the answers are the facts, because here we act with facts and with the well-being of Colombians in mind ”.

Colombia is expected to receive a total of 20 million doses of this mechanism throughout 2021. Among these, ten million will be manufactured by the American Pfizer, in alliance with the German firm BioNTech; while the The remaining ten million will correspond to the alternative developed by the British AstraZeneca, which had the support of the University of Oxford.

Ghana, an African country, has already benefited from the same system that on February 24, he received a total of 600,000 doses vaccine from this second laboratory. Such a quantity reached the capital, Accra.

Once this delivery was completed, the director of Unicef ​​for West and Central Africa, Marie Pierre-Poirier, noted that “it is a turning point. We estimate that we will deliver 1.3 billion doses in 2021 with the COVAX association, this will only cover 20% of the most vulnerable population of any country on the planet, there is still a lot to do. But we started the first phase today ”.

The confirmation of the arrival of the first Covax vaccines in Colombia was celebrated by the Chief of Staff of the Presidency of the Republic, María Paula Correa, who wrote on her Twitter account that “Colombia will be the first country in Latin America and the second in the world to receive vaccines against #COVID ー 19. On Monday March 1, we will receive 117,000 doses of vaccines from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Mass vaccination continues! “.

Besides Colombia, the mechanism is also expected to reach Côte d’Ivoire, Bolivia, El Salvador and Peru in the coming days. The program was initiated by the Coalition to Promote Innovations for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), the Gavi Alliance for Vaccines (Gavi) and the World Health Organization (WHO), with the goal that all participating countries can have equitable access to covid-19 vaccines throughout 2021.

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