COVID-19 vaccine arrives in Latin America from Belgium and Russia

Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile and Argentina focused attention on the Latin American fight against the coronavirus on Wednesday, when the first doses of the vaccines were received in their territories from Belgium and Russia, with the first three countries beginning vaccination this Thursday. 

Thus, the first vials of the compounds developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Gamaleya laboratories are reaching a Latin America that has a huge share of the 33,251,796 cases of SARS-CoV-2 and 820,013 deaths from COVID-19 confirmed throughout the Americas by the World Health Organisation (WHO). 

On the one hand, a DHL plane from Belgium landed with a quantity of doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine still to be confirmed at Mexico City International Airport at 09.02 local time (15.02 GMT), where it was received by the authorities. 

The expected load will be used from this Thursday to immunize medical personnel who attend to coronavirus patients in the Mexican capital. 

Once the health team attending SARS-CoV-2 patients has been vaccinated, it is planned that the rest of the medical personnel and other population will be gradually vaccinated between February 2021 and March 2022, according to age and chronic diseases.

The pandemic has left a balance of 1,338,426 infections and 119,495 deaths in Mexico, according to the independent count of Johns Hopkins University. 

On the other hand, an Aerolíneas Argentinas plane that took off on Tuesday from Buenos Aires is already waiting at Sheremetievo airport in Moscow to be loaded with 300,000 doses of the Sputnik-V vaccine, developed by the Gamaleya laboratory, and registered last August. 

According to the Rossískaya Gazeta newspaper, the AR-1060 flight arrived in the Russian capital after a 15-hour non-stop journey and will return to Argentina in a few hours with the first batch of the Russian vaccine. 

The plane, which will transport the doses of the preparation in thermal containers at a temperature of 18 degrees below zero, is expected to land at the Buenos Aires terminal of Ezeiza this Thursday at 10.00 local time. 

In accordance with this logistical management, the National Administration of Drugs, Food and Medical Technology (Anmat) approved the use of Sputnik-V this past day. 

On December 12, an official delegation led by the Argentine Secretary of Access to Health, Carla Vizzotti, and presidential advisor Cecilia Nicolini, left for Moscow to finalise the details of the shipment of Sputnik-V.

However, in Argentina there was a commotion over doubts about the safety of the application in the population over 60 years of age when the same Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said he would not apply the vaccine because he was 68 years old. 

Sputnik-V will be the first antidote to reach Argentina, when the cases of COVID-19, which so far number 1,555,279, are beginning to grow again, and 42,254 of them have been fatal. 

Costa Rica is already in the process of receiving its first 9,750 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and will begin administering them on Thursday to nursing homes and health personnel. 

Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado said the first to be vaccinated will be frontline health workers and older adults living in nursing homes. 

Costa Rica has an agreement with Pfizer/BioNTech to vaccinate 1.5 million people. It also has a commitment with AstraZeneca to cover 500,000 people and another with the Covax Mechanism to protect one million people.

With these vaccines, Costa Rica, which as of this Wednesday has 161,942 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 2,065 deaths, hopes to cover 80% of the population over 18 years of age. 

The same is true in Chile, which will begin vaccination this Thursday when it receives its first shipment of Pfizer/BioNtTech vaccine at 07.00 local time. 

Chile, which has already had more than 590,000 cases since March and 16,228 deaths from COVID-19, has signed agreements with other laboratories for the distribution of vaccines, including the Chinese firm Sinovac, the Janssen group of Johnson & Johnson and the AstraZeneca group in collaboration with Oxford University. 

Puerto Rico was a Latin American pioneer eight days ago in the application of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, but since that day it has also been using the one manufactured by Moderna, which received the authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last December 18. 

Moderna's compound will be used primarily to inoculate non-hospital workers in what will be the first regional vaccination centre, located in a San Juan coliseum.

Around 4,000 people are expected to be vaccinated at the 16 stations in the coliseum, where the process will continue until Sunday. In the following days, more centres will be opened in Caguas, Arecibo and Ponce. 

The total number of deaths from the pandemic in Puerto Rico is 1,408, according to data released this Wednesday by the Department of Health, and the positive number is 66,583. 

In the meantime, the contagion trail continues to increase on the continent. According to the government of Brasilia, from Tuesday to Wednesday Brazil recorded 961 new deaths from the coronavirus, bringing the total number of deaths to 189,220, while the number of those infected is around 7.4 million. 

As part of its own battle against the pathogen that causes COVID-19, the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil's most populous state and hit by the pandemic, announced that the antiCOVID vaccine developed by the Chinese laboratory Sinovac had achieved the minimum efficacy and safety required for use, although it did not specify the respective levels. 

The lack of concrete data on "Coronavac", which was developed in cooperation with the Butantan Institute and was due to be released this week, generated some frustration. 

The huge $900 billion anti-COVID-19 economic stimulus passed by both Houses of the US Congress suffered a major setback when President Donald Trump threatened to veto any direct transfer of $600 to people with incomes under $75,000 as "ridiculous" and push the amount up to $2,000. 

Faced with this impasse, House Democrats will attempt to modify the stimulus plan on Thursday. 

All this while the corona virus continues unstoppable in America, as confirmed by the 14,233 new positive cases this Wednesday in Colombia, a new negative record of daily cases in that country.