RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The second batch of vaccines against Covid-19, containing 50,400 doses, that Uruguay receives through the Covax mechanism of the World Health Organization (WHO) has arrived in the country, advised the Presidency this Saturday.
This is the second shipment that Uruguay has received through this mechanism; the first 48,000 doses of this vaccine arrived on April 4.
Three vaccines are now in use in Uruguay, as inoculations are already being carried out using the American Pfizer and the Chinese Sinovac since the beginning of March.
This is the second batch within the 1.5 million doses that Uruguay has secured within the Covax mechanism. The rest is expected to arrive in the coming weeks in different stages.
The Government has been very critical of the WHO strategy due to the deadlines they have managed for the shipment of doses with such a delay that the Executive had to go out on its own in search of other vaccines.
This Friday, 120,000 doses of Pfizer arrived in Uruguay on a flight from the United States. At the same time, the Secretary of the Presidency, Álvaro Delgado, informed that on May 28th, 550,000 doses of CoronaVac would arrive.
In fact, President Luis Lacalle Pou said during the XXVII Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government that there was “a failure of international bureaucratic institutions” in the supply of vaccines against covid-19.
“It is urgent to make decisions in the short, medium, and long term so that these organizations, which make up a large part of the world’s nations, have mechanisms that are sufficiently logical and adequate for the reality we may be living,” he emphasized with respect to the WHO strategy.
For the moment, the vaccines that have already arrived from AstraZeneca have been sent to the areas along the land border with Brazil since it is one of the areas most affected by the pandemic; people over 60 years of age have been inoculated.
By Saturday noon, May 15, 1,332,638 people have been inoculated with the first dose of Sinovac, AstraZeneca, or Pfizer. Of these, 930,300 have received the first dose of Pfizer or Sinovac.
This means that 38.01% of the population has received the first dose, and 26.53% have received the second dose.
Since the pandemic began in Uruguay, the country has accumulated 235,206 cases and 3,369 deaths.