President Nayib Bukele reported on Thursday that the Salvadoran government will donate vaccines against COVID-19 to immunize the residents of the Nueva Ocotepeque municipality and four others from the island department of the Bay Islands of Honduras.
“I have authorized international aid with vaccines against COVID-19 for the municipalities of Nueva Ocotepeque and all of the department of the Bay Islands (Roatán, José Santos Guardiola, Guanaja and Utila), in our sister Republic of Honduras,” said the president on his official Twitter account.
Bukele reported that the representatives of the municipalities of Honduras, including the four tourist islands, will meet on Saturday with the Minister of Health, Francisco Alabí, to learn specific details of the population and “to be able to calculate the number of doses to share and safeguard the Honduran life ”.
Bukele said that he saw a video of the population of Ocotepeque requesting vaccines, “they also gave me the report from the Bay Islands that also make their request.”
The president assured that the donation will not affect the rate of vaccination in El Salvador. “We are placing the maximum daily of vaccines and they will come out of surpluses in our programmed flows,” he explained.
In response to the request of seven Honduran mayors, El Salvador recently sent refrigerated trucks to that country with 34,000 vaccines against COVID-19 from the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca that will be used to immunize the population most at risk in those localities.
El Salvador has received through the COVAX mechanism – created under the support of organizations such as the World Health Organization to guarantee equitable access to immunization – vaccines from AstraZeneca and Pfizer, but it has also bought doses of AstraZeneca and Sinovac. China donated 150,000 doses of the second.
The Ministry of Health previously reported that it has more than 2.7 million doses and that the arrival of new batches is expected in the coming days. Recently, El Salvador signed an agreement with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer for the supply of 4.4 million vaccines.
El Salvador has applied the first dose to 1.1 million people, including doctors and health personnel, soldiers, police, teachers and administrative personnel of public and private schools and universities. More than 846,000 people have already received the second dose.
So far the Central American country has registered 73,702 infections and 2,255 deaths from COVID-19, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Science and Systems Engineering.
–
