Vaccines: Alberto announces with AMLO a record shipment and the end of the bottleneck

The TV news broadcast on split screen: On the one hand, the opposition leader deploring that the ineptitude of the government has left Argentina without vaccines, a few centimeters away, the live camera from Ezeiza airport showing the arrival, barely thirteen minute intervals, two flights from Moscow (another left this morning) and Miami, with a total of 1,453,565 doses. The bottleneck that made it necessary to regulate the speed of sanitary operation across the country seems to have been left behind.

Today Alberto Fernández will announce with his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador the first delivery from this country. Argentina will then have four channels open to receive vaccines: Mexico, United States (both with an active compound made in the country), COVAX and Russia. In addition, a new contract with Sinopharm (China) is being negotiated and at the end of June the first doses of Sputnik that the Richmond laboratory will produce in its Buenos Aires plant could begin to be distributed.

Argentina, which Today it is the seventh G20 country that has vaccinated the most in relation to its population and number 20 in the world in total number of doses applied, you can further accelerate the pace of your operations. Not only because of the number of items available, but also because of the predictability of new arrivals which allows us to step on the accelerator without fear of running out of stock. Last week was a record: 1,146,638 people were vaccinated. If inventory forecasts are met, this number should double early.

In government, there is a goal that no one dares to verbalize so as not to be imprisoned by their words, knowing that there are so many factors that are beyond the will and capacity of any public servant. With the arrival of vaccines scheduled for the last days of May and the first of June, it suffices to complete the vaccination of all Argentines who belong, by age or by clinical condition, to one of the risk groups.. Fernández would like to take this key step before winter arrives.

The joint announcement with AMLO will be made by video call as part of the traditional “Mañanera” press conference that the Mexican president gives every day. The number of doses that will arrive in Argentina is not yet confirmed, nor the dates, but we are talking about no less than four million doses of AstraZeneca between the rest of this month and the next. Four million doses are expected from the United States this month and another as many next month. The total of the agreement with the British laboratory is 22 million.

The contract with the Russian Direct Investment Fund for Sputnik, meanwhile, includes 30 million doses, half of the first part and half of the second. So far, out of sixteen Aerolineas Argentinas flights, 6,585,550 from one and 1,060,160 from the other have arrived. The seventeenth left this morning. Last week, President Vladimir Putin publicly stated that “regular expeditions have already been established” so the government is convinced to keep the pace of two weekly trips.

The deal with the Richmond lab to produce the Gamaleya vaccine in Argentina provides for this contract to be completed for $ 30million before starting to export to the rest of Latin America, but even then the provision could be extended if the country needed it. In the same way, technology transfer to mAbxience, which manufactures the active compound AstraZeneca, could be completed in the future to produce the vaccine 100% locally and there are advanced discussions in the same vein with Sinopharm.

In this way Not only is a sufficient number of treatments guaranteed to reach the entire adult population of the country before the end of the year. Argentina also protects itself from the need for strengthening a few months after the second dose., or before the appearance of a strain requiring a new vaccination campaign. The development of local production capacity will save time and provide an emergency response should the pandemic make it necessary.

In government plans, June is a tipping point for the pandemic. The vaccination of all Argentines at risk is expected to significantly reduce the lethality of the disease and, to a lesser extent, the strain on the health system. Along with a policy of intermittent closures and openings (planned or depending on epidemiological parameters), the progress of the operation could start to bend the contagion curve during the winter., despite the low temperatures, and finish the job with the onset of spring.