Chile purchased an additional three million doses of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine and will begin immunizing people between the ages of 35 and 45 in the next two weeks before the constituent elections, President Sebastián Piñera reported on Saturday.
The president said that half of that batch will arrive on Sunday, which will total 17.2 million doses of that drug received by the South American country in the first half of 2021.
Along with those 17.2 million, almost 2.6 million doses from Pfizer / BioNTech and 158,000 from AstraZeneca have already been received, via the international COVAX mechanism.
In addition, the vaccination calendar will be advanced and next week all people between 45 and 40 years old and between 39 and 35 years old will be able to inoculate themselves the following week, prior to the elections of the Constituent Convention to prepare a new fundamental letter, of mayors, councilors and governors, scheduled for May 15 and 16.
Authorities expect to have seven million people with two doses of the vaccine by that date.
Currently, according to the latest figures provided by the authorities, almost 8.1 million people have been vaccinated with one dose (52.9% of the vaccinable population) and almost 6.7 with two doses (44% of the population ).
This places Chile as the second country with the highest percentage of fully vaccinated population in the world and behind Israel, according to the authorities.
The country is still going through a critical moment of the pandemic with a good part of its population under quarantine and hospitals 94% saturated. Chile has so far registered more than 1.2 million cases and almost 26,500 deaths from COVID-19.
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