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Peru began distributing China’s Sinopharm vaccine on Tuesday morning, with frontline health workers given priority in the first phase of the deployment.
The country has participated in clinical trials of the Sinopharm vaccine since last year and becomes the first country in Latin America to deploy the Chinese vaccine.
A group of doctors from Arzobispo Loayza Hospital in Lima were the first to receive the vaccine on Tuesday morning, the official Andina news agency reported.
President Francisco Sagasti is expected to be vaccinated later Tuesday.
Peru received its first shipment of 300,000 doses of China’s Sinopharm coronavirus vaccine on Sunday and expects to receive the remaining 700,000 doses on February 14. The armed forces will be in charge of distributing the vaccine across the country.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Elizabeth Astete announced that her government had reached an agreement with Pfizer for the supply of 20 million doses of their vaccine, the official Andina news agency reported.
Astete told a congressional committee that 250,000 doses will arrive in March and at least 300,000 in April, Andina reported.
“We have been assured that Peru will have received at least 5,750,000 vaccines by July 1, and the supply will increase significantly to 20 million since then,” said Astete.
Astete also told lawmakers his government signed an agreement to receive 6.6 million doses of Pfizer and AstraZeneca through the Covax program to immunize 20% of the population.
President Sagasti, who took office in November, has been criticized for the delay in reaching a supply agreement for the vaccine.
Peru currently has 1,186,698 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and has recorded 42,308 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
The country is reporting more than 6,000 cases per day, an increase from 2,000 cases per day in early January, as it also faces a shortage of intensive care unit (ICU) beds and oxygen during this period. new wave of pandemic.
Peru has the fifth highest number of Covid-19 cases in Latin America, after Brazil, Colombia, Argentina and Mexico according to JHU data.
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