MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chile speeding up its vaccination campaign: 455,000 from critical groups in two days

Of the total number of people immunized, 91,843 are over 85 years old, since the Chilean vaccination plan began with this age group considered to be at most risk

Chilean Health Minister Enrique Paris reported on Friday that 454,155 people have been vaccinated against COVID-19 in the country so far, as part of the mass vaccination plan that kicked off on Wednesday.

“We hope this level of participation at vaccination centers continues in the next few days, which will achieve the immunization of critical groups,” the official said in a statement.

Of the total number of people immunized, 91,843 are over 85 years old, since the Chilean vaccination plan began with this age group considered to be at most risk.

Chile's vaccination plan is underway thanks to the almost four million doses which arrived in the country from the Chinese firm Sinovac.

Chile has secured 36 million vaccine doses so far, including 10 million each from Pfizer-BioNTech and Sinovac, and four million each from AstraZeneca-Oxford and Johnson & Johnson, Rodrigo Yanez, the undersecretary of international economic relations, said in an interview.

The government also has almost 8 million from the global vaccine-supply program COVAX. “We are looking for plan B with other laboratories, in case the ones we have could fail.”

Yañez called Chile “an example” to the world on diversifying vaccine sources and said his team is in communication with Moderna and Novavax and trying to make contact with Russia’s Sputnik 5.

Chile is the Latin American country that has secured the most vaccines relative to its population (18,9 million) .

According to the latest report from the Ministry of Health, Chile has accumulated 744,019 COVID-19 cases and 18,808 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, after reporting 3,786 infections and 77 deaths in the last 24 hours.