Chilean President Sebastián Piñera announced Wednesday that vaccination against COVID-19 will begin in the country next Thursday following the expected arrival of the first 10,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
“This morning, at 5:00 am, the plane that will bring the first 10,000 doses of the vaccine from the Pfizer-BioNTech laboratory to our country took off from Belgium,” the president announced from La Moneda.
As he specified, “the plane will arrive in Chile around 7am tomorrow and we are ready and prepared to start a vaccination process.”
“This means that from tomorrow, Chile will start its vaccination process, which will be carried out gradually, just as the shipments of vaccines will arrive in our country periodically and systematically,” the president clarified.
Piñera explained that Chile has succeeded in securing “more than 10 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and more than 10 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine (…) We will have more than 30 million doses of vaccine in our country “.
To date, Chile has already added 589,189 confirmed cases, with 559,845 patients recovered and 16,217 fatalities. According to the latest official data from Tuesday, 683 people are currently hospitalized, 516 of whom are in need of mechanical ventilation and 58 are in critical condition.