Covid-19: President Castillo announces installation of Sputnik V vaccine production in Peru

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Monday, Peru’s president Pedro Castillo, announced that a plant for the production of Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccines will be installed in Peru.

“As a result of negotiations between the Peruvian and Russian governments, the installation of a Sputnik vaccine production plant in the country has been planned,” Castillo said in a message to the nation, over a month after his inauguration.

“Health Minister Hernando Cevallos will provide more details about this project,” the president said, without offering further information on the negotiations with the Russian government. Cevallos later told the press that the plant would start operations in 2023.

“We do not want create short-term expectations because this is a process, first commercial and later the implementation of a production plant and we would not be able to define a date. We believe that it would be by 2023, if we are very lucky,” he added in an interview.

Castillo also announced that in order to accelerate the vaccination of Peru’s population, the delivery of the Sinopharm and Pfizer vaccines acquired by the government is being brought forward. “Without vaccination there will be no full economic reactivation, that is why we are bringing forward vaccine delivery,” he said.

“By September we have programmed the delivery of 12 million vaccines, and with this we hope to meet the goal of vaccinating 50% of the population,” he said.

Some 8.5 million Peruvians have been administered two doses of the vaccine against Covid-19, representing 26% of Peru’s 33 million inhabitants.

The President also announced that the government has allocated 2.89 billion soles (US$705 million) to implement a plan to address the third wave of the pandemic. Peruvian authorities project that the third wave will cause between 67,300 and 115,000 deaths.

Peru now totals almost 198,000 deaths and more than 2.1 million infections since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

In his message, Castillo made a number of announcements related to the reactivation of the economy, lowering the price of domestic gas, vaccines against Covid-19 and confirmed that his cabinet is under constant assessment.

Castillo said that the delivery of the Yanapay 350 soles voucher to more than 13 million Peruvians in a vulnerable situation will begin on September 13. “This measure involves an injection of 5 billion soles into the national economy, with which we expect to create around 40,000 direct and indirect jobs,” he said in his first address from the Government Palace.

According to the latest national CPI poll, 43.5% of the population disapproves and the same percentage approves of Castillo’s administration, which began five weeks ago.