With Pfizer, Uruguay becomes the first Latin American country to immunize children under 18

Uruguay has already started this Wednesday to vaccinate the population under the age of 18 against the coronavirus, becoming the first country in the Latin American region to do so.

The Uruguayan Ministry of Health has indicated that the inoculation will be carried out in order of age. The 17 years will be the first to receive the dose and it will continue to do so gradually until they are 12 years old. With this decision, it is excluded that the vaccination is applied depending on the order of registration.

The vaccine that the miners will receive will be that of Pzifer, the only one approved in the country, on the model of the United States and the European Union, to vaccinate this group, which moreover will not have to wait so long between the two requests required to obtain immunity, but it will only take 28 days between the first and second dose.

Back to school

Uruguay advances vaccination of under-18s with a view to returning face-to-face classes for after the winter holidays – July.

This age group, from 12 to 17 years old, in Uruguay is made up of approximately 290,000 young people, and until Monday 150,000 people have requested an appointment for vaccination, who began to receive the injection on Wednesday.

The president of the National Authority for Public Education, Robert Silva, called the event “good news for the country and for education, ”as he wrote on his Twitter account early Wednesday.

According to the latest report from health authorities, the country has accumulated 322,978 COVID-19 infections so far, of which 283,397 have recovered and 4,749 have died.

The case of Chile

Chile is the same in Uruguay. The Trans-Andean country, where the vaccination campaign is one of the most successful in the world, on June 1 approved the use of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine in people aged 12 to 16 years.

But this group still has no date to join the mass inoculation process.

Chile has approved the Pfizer vaccine for minors also supported by a clinical study conducted by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and Health Canada.

“This is also very good news for advancing the immunity of the cocoon protect our teens, which with two doses and 14 days will have a very good immunity to resume the desired normality, ”said Heriberto García, director of the Institute of Public Health (ISP), in a statement.

Mass vaccination began on February 3 with the Pfizer and Sinovac vaccines in Chile, starting with the elderly. From the first week of June, the campaign was already covering young people aged 23 to 25.

Chile has so far received 3.6 million doses of Pfizer and 17.1 million doses of Sinovac vaccine. And 693,000 from Covax (Astrazeneca) and 300,000 from Cansino joined it.

However, neither in Chile nor in Uruguay vaccination has succeeded in stopping the coronavirus. The number of infected people remains high and worrying.

Daily covid-19 infections in Chile remain above 6,000 cases, with a positivity above 10%, with hospital care at full capacity, and a relaxation of the population on health restrictions after a permit issued by the government which gives greater mobility to those vaccinated with two doses.

After a 14-month pandemic, covid-19 caused 1.3 million infections in Chile and more than 29,000 deaths.

Clarin editorial staff