The Covax initiative debuts in Latin America with 117,000 vaccines for Colombia

The flight with the first 117,000 vaccines of the Covax initiative, at the El Dorado airport in Bogotá.Nicolás Galeano / EFE

The Covax mechanism has finally landed in Latin America.

Colombia became the first country in the region on Monday to receive a batch of 117,000 doses from Pfizer and BioNTech through the multilateral initiative, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), which intends to distribute close to 2,000 million of coronavirus vaccines among low- and middle-income countries.

"We join this effort in a signal of clear support for multilateralism" in the fight against the pandemic, declared President Iván Duque from the Casa de Nariño shortly after the arrival of the DHL flight at the El Dorado airport in Bogotá.

“Today is a very important milestone.

Covax makes its first delivery of vaccines in the Western Hemisphere, in the Americas, and the first country to receive these doses is Colombia ”, the president celebrated.

"Access to vaccines is not only the right thing to do, but it is the smartest thing we can do because the more the virus circulates, the greater the opportunity it will have to reduce the effectiveness of the vaccines," said the WHO director general, Tedros, linked from Geneva. Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

"Over time we will have enough vaccines for everyone, but for now they are a limited resource that must be used equitably and intelligently," he said.

At a time when the volume of criticism of developed countries for monopolizing the production of vaccines to be able to alleviate the pandemic and reactivate the economy rises, the Covax program, promoted by the WHO and the GAVI Vaccine Alliance, aims to achieve this year to 20% of the population of the 200 countries that have signed up.

In Colombia, the authorities plan to immunize 10 million people through the mechanism - which requires 20 million doses.

The Duque government chose to combine this multilateral strategy with several bilateral negotiations with pharmaceutical companies, the details of which it has only delivered drop-wise, shielded by confidentiality agreements.

The Executive has announced that it has guaranteed the necessary doses to vaccinate 35 of its 50 million inhabitants in 2021, which would allow it to achieve collective immunity.

Apart from the Covax initiative, Colombia has signed agreements with Pfizer / BioNTech, Sinovac, Oxford / AstraZeneca, Moderna and also Janssen, from Johnson & Johnson, the only one that requires a single injection.

The Covax batch, however, landed amid questions about the vaccines that do not arrive and the rate of application of those that have arrived.

The public debate has been marked by a feeling of delay compared to other countries in the region.

The first shipment of 50,000 doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine landed amid paraphernalia on Monday, February 15, and two days later the long-awaited postcard of the first injection occurred.

Since then, another shipment of 192,000 vaccines has arrived from China Sinovac and a second batch with another 50,000 from Pfizer, to which are added the 117,000 this Monday for a total of 409,000 doses.

Duque announced last week that Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping confirmed that another two million doses of Sinovac will land next Sunday, March 7.

The president himself set the goal of immunizing more than a million Colombians in the first month of vaccination, but the plan for now is not advancing at the required rate.

Until this Monday, the country had applied 130,578 doses in less than two weeks, while the Health Ministry has indicated that it needs to reach a speed that is well above 100,000 daily injections.

The plan started with first-line health workers and those over 80 years of age, gradually prioritizing other groups of older adults and people with comorbidities.

After overcoming the second wave of the pandemic in January, Colombia reported 36,709 active cases of covid-19 as of this Monday, with a marked downward trend.

The country accumulates more than 2.2 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus and is close to 60,000 registered deaths.

It is one of the first countries in the world to receive vaccines through Covax, which launched last Wednesday with the arrival in Ghana of 600,000 doses of the vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.

The president of the African nation, Nana Akufo-Addo, 76, also became the first to be vaccinated on Monday through a dose financed by the Covax device, reports the agency France Presse.

Ivory Coast, South Korea and India have also received vaccines from the multilateral initiative.

The mechanism plans to distribute 337 million doses in the first half of 2021. Of that first delivery, about 10% will be for Latin American and Caribbean countries, including Colombia, Bolivia, El Salvador and Peru, which have been selected for the Primera Ola pilot program.

Most of the vaccines in the region will be destined for countries that participate in the financing of the program, such as Colombia, Mexico, Brazil or Peru.

Others, such as El Salvador, Bolivia, Haiti and Nicaragua will receive their doses from a special financing mechanism.

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