Most of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have difficulties with access to vaccines to protect their population from Covid-19, Luis Felipe López-Calva, UNDP regional director, denounced today.
The official of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said that this fact becomes more marked when these purchases are restricted only to vaccines that are authorized.
When analyzing the current situation of the development, production and acquisition of these drugs in the race against the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus, López Calva criticized that the richest nations have reserved most of the doses, hedging their bets through a range of possible vaccine candidates.
He said that once the hurdle of getting a vaccine has been overcome, it now needs to be purchased, manufactured, delivered and administered, so estimates predict that it may take until the end of 2023 to produce considerable quantities for everyone.
The representative of the UN development agency meant that within the more developed nations, only Canada and the United Kingdom have bought enough nationally authorized injectables to administer two doses to each person.
Referring to Latin America and the Caribbean, he assured that although Chile has an advantage, the situation changes daily, as countries constantly negotiate new purchase contracts and more vaccines are approved to meet authorization standards.
He stressed that the incredible collaboration of scientists with public and private sector actors achieved ‘the great feat of developing, testing and approving vaccines in record time’, however, although that first technical obstacle has been overcome, the race against the virus is far away. to finish, he alerted.
López-Calva highlighted that in the face of the enormous challenge of equity, global mechanisms such as Covax (led by the GAVI Vaccine Alliance, the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Innovation in Epidemic Preparedness) play a fundamental role in the access to vaccines by the poorest countries.
Many Latin American nations have joined this initiative, and Covax has already notified that Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador and Peru will be part of the first wave of dose distribution, through which they will jointly receive 377.910 injections in the middle of this month.
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