Four countries in the Americas have fewer than 1% vaccinated with both doses

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Four countries in the Americas, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, and Venezuela, have less than 1% of their population fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Worse yet, no immunization has yet been administered in Haiti.

The contrast with the United States, which has already vaccinated with at least one dose 154 million people, 46% of its population and 117 million have the complete scheme (35%) makes the inequity even more lacerating, as reaching herd immunity requires around 70% of the population to be vaccinated.

Images of people getting rid of their masks in the streets of the United States have circulated on social networks, in a week when 1.2 million people have been infected, and almost 34,000 have died in the Americas, according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).

CENTRAL AMERICA HAS THE BIGGEST BACKLOG

Of the four countries with the fewest vaccinations in the continent, Guatemala and Honduras are in Central America. Only 2,521 people in Guatemala have received two doses of the vaccine, 0.01%, and 257,247 have received at least one dose, 1.36% of the population.

Delay in vaccines is also a problem in Honduras, where the dates announced for the arrival of the drugs have been only half met, as on Friday, when only 40,000 of the Russian Sputnik V were received, out of the 80,000 that the Honduran Foreign Minister, Lisandro Rosales, announced on April 25 from Moscow.

In this country, 55,000 people have at least one inoculated dose (0.56%) and 2,639 people both (0.03%), according to April data from Our World in Data.

The exception in the isthmus is El Salvador, which in recent weeks has given a boost to its vaccination process, with 995,901 citizens, 15.35 % of its population, with at least one inoculated dose, and 264,673 people, 4 %, with both.

Among the other countries with low vaccination percentages are Paraguay, with 0.22% of its population with both doses, and Venezuela, with 0.88% of people with at least one dose. The lack of information on the rate of vaccination in Nicaragua and Cuba, the latter with its own vaccines, does not allow placing them in the global ranking.

Also of concern is Brazil, which, despite a good pace, has slowed down vaccination and has had to suspend as of Friday, May 14, the production of the vaccine developed by the Chinese laboratory Sinovac,due to the lack of raw material produced in the Asian country.

66% OF THE VACCINES IN THE AMERICAS WENT TO THE U.S.A.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), less than 1% of the doses administered worldwide have reached developing countries. According to figures from the Our World in Data portal, of 403.7 million vaccines administered in the Americas, 266.6 million went to the United States, or 66%.

In South America, 90.3 million people have been vaccinated with at least one dose, 22.3% of the continent’s total and considerably less than in the USA.

With this in mind, many wealthy Latin Americans have traveled to the United States to skip the line in their countries.

According to the press, travel agencies throughout Latin America are already arranging visits for tourists to be vaccinated in the U.S., and there is a clear flow of Mexicans to southern destinations such as Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana, which started the immunization without restrictions or registration of the immigration status of the patients.

Once the local demand has been overcome, the North American country opens its doors to tourists while insisting on increasingly sophisticated campaigns (offers in movie theaters, travel agencies and fast food businesses) to attract its most skeptical citizens.

SINGING VICTORY?

Far from claiming victory, the lag and inequality in vaccination in the Americas also poses a danger for countries with more income and vaccines.

The higher the level of virus transmission in populations, the more likely viral mutations will occur, and new variants invulnerable to immunizers will emerge. “This is one of the reasons why curbing transmission is so important,” Jairo Méndez Rico, a PAHO advisor, explained at a seminar this week.