Chile has blinded the world today. The South American country has become the Latin American champion in COVID-19 vaccination and is among the first five countries to lead the way in immunization against the virus.
Since the start of its massive vaccination campaign in February, Chile has vaccinated more than 25% of its population, only lagging behind Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom worldwide. And this country of 19 million people wants to vaccinate 80% of its inhabitants by the end of June.
What is behind Chile’s success?
Officials and experts say the explanation lies in early and simultaneous negotiations with several pharmaceutical companies, previous contacts with a few companies and a solid vaccination system covering the full 4,000 kilometers of its territory.
During the first months of the pandemic, in 2020, the headlines were that Chile had become one of the countries most affected by the virus in the region, after Brazil and Peru, and the authorities were heavily criticized for not were able to locate and isolate. people to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
At the same time, however, another story unfolded that few people knew, started many weeks earlier, and that would later help ensure rapid access to vaccines.
Science Minister Andrés Couve told The Associated Press that formal negotiations with pharmaceutical companies began in April, a month after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In May, he said, they had already presented President Sebastián Piñera with a roadmap outlining some plans to acquire the vaccines as soon as they were developed, including the country’s participation in clinical trials.
But part of the history of getting vaccines goes back to October 2019, in China, two months before the Asian nation announced the first cases of the new coronavirus. That month, Dr. Alexis Kalergis, biochemist and director of the Millennium Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy at Catholic University, held an international conference on immunology in Beijing with two Chilean colleagues.
There he met several expert colleagues, including some from the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech Ltd, which would very soon be the key to the development of the new coronavirus vaccine.
When China announced in January 2020 that it had identified a new virus, Kalergis thought of the Sinovac experts he had seen in Beijing and began contacting them.
“We are working on vaccines and we know that the kind of health tools needed for a disease of this type are exactly vaccines,” Kalergis told the AP. “And using the experience, the contacts and the interest we showed, it was determined that we started discussions with Sinovac.
The immunologist said he spoke with Catholic University rector Ignacio Sánchez about the need to involve the government. Sánchez met with officials from the Ministries of Health, Science and the State Department, to whom he explained that formal negotiations should be started as soon as possible. Then April came and negotiations began.
At the head of the negotiations was Rodrigo Yáñez, Undersecretary for International Economic Relations. From the start, he told the AP, it had been agreed to speak with various companies, laboratories and global agencies, such as the UN, and always close without any means.
“At the heart of Chile’s vaccination program and vaccine search strategy was exactly this pragmatism, this flexibility,” he told the AP. They always looked, he added, “different alternatives and didn’t put all the eggs in the same basket.”
In June, long before there was a Latin American country, Chile had signed a contract with Sinovac, according to Kalergis, which promised to make preferential deliveries as soon as the vaccine was approved.
In addition, in December 2020, Chile was part of the clinical trials of the Sinovac vaccine involving 2,300 people, mostly medical personnel. The South American country also participated in the trials with AstraZeneca, Janssen and CanSino, another Chinese pharmaceutical company.
Chile has currently purchased just over 35 million doses. To date, Sinovac has pledged 14 million doses, Pfizer 10.1 million and AstraZeneca four million, and the government has secured a further 7.8 million through the international Covax mechanism, which aims to promote equitable access to vaccines in the world. At the moment, the authorities have invested $ 200 million and estimate a further $ 100 million to inject.
Chile has done so well that last week it donated 20,000 doses of Sinovac to Paraguay and the same amount to Ecuador, for use by health professionals.
For Yáñez, the main Chilean negotiator, “it is perfectly possible that the country also articulates and triangulates in some way … supporting other countries in management that may not have the capacity to manage this purchase.”
No Latin American country has managed to vaccinate as many people as Chile. Far behind Brazil with 4% of the population and Argentina with about 3%.
For now, Chinese doses have become the mainstay of the Chilean vaccination program.
The country received just over 21,000 doses of Pfizer in December, less than promised, and began vaccinating health workers. But in January, he received the first four million vaccinations from Sinovac and then accelerated.
The mass vaccination began on Feb. 3, and since then Chile has vaccinated more than 100,000 people almost daily, although this week it hit the record of 415,000 people immunized in one day.
On Wednesday, the country also hit the global daily record of 1.3 vaccines per 100 inhabitants, followed by Israel at 1.04 doses, according to data from Our World in Data, a platform developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of Oxfors. and the non-profit organization “Global Change Data Lab”.
Chile has recorded more than 885,000 confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic and more than 21,500 deaths.
“Chile’s primary health care system is the most important in Latin America,” and during the vaccination process, “it has proven its absolute strength,” said Dr. Mercedes López Nitsche, Director of the Faculty’s Immunology Program, at AP. Medicine from the University of Chile and from the Millennium Nucleus of Immunology and Immunotherapy National Program.
This is not the first time that Chile has shown the strength of its vaccination system: between March and April 2020, when the virus spread around the world, the country vaccinated eight million people against the flu.
The Deputy Director of the Pan American Health Organization, Jarbas Barbosa, attributed Chile’s success to the fact that “it is a high-income country” as it “had good planning and used the resources wisely to negotiate bilateral agreements. closing with a number of producers “.
Mario Patiño, a 75-year-old travel agent, was one of those who received the first dose of Sinovac in February in Lo Padro, a poor community on the outskirts of Santiago.
“Everything was perfect, everything was fast, excellent care, well organized,” said the man who was due to receive his second dose this weekend. For him, he added, receiving the vaccine means ‘being calmer’.