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Caracas (AFP)
Venezuela will apply a third booster anticovid dose in the first half of 2022, said this Sunday President Nicolás Maduro, who aims for 95% of the inhabitants to be vaccinated by the end of 2021.
In “2022 we will be, already in the first semester, ready for the booster vaccination (…). I will bring the booster vaccines from January,” he announced in an address broadcast on state television.
“We are studying which is the best booster vaccine: the Sputnik, the Chinese, the Abdala, the Johnson & Johnson Janssen, it is very good, a single position,” advanced Maduro, predicting reaching 95% of immunized “at 31 December “this year.
According to the Chavista ruler, 53.5% of this country with 30 million inhabitants has been immunized, without specifying whether they have received the full vaccination scheme.
To date, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) estimates 9.9 million Venezuelans immunized with a first dose and 6.1 million with two doses.
Venezuela initially began its immunization program against covid-19 with the Russian Sputnik V vaccine and the Chinese Sinopharm, two doses.
In July, the government began to supply three-dose Cuban Abdala in Caracas, then a vaccine candidate, amid criticism from the medical union.
The president also announced the temporary suspension of a plan called “7 + 7”, which alternates seven days of “radical quarantine”, when all businesses are forced to close except those in prioritized sectors such as food or health, with seven of “flexibilization”, which allow activities to be reactivated.
“It has been proposed in the presidential commission from November 1 to December 31 to declare those weeks of November and December, at the end of the year, as weeks of safe flexibility at the commercial, labor and economic level of the country (…), we temporarily suspend the ‘7 + 7’, “he said.
Last year, Maduro also announced as a Christmas “gift” the relaxation of controls in December.
Compliance with the quarantine, in force since the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, is difficult in this country, where three out of every four Venezuelans live in extreme poverty, according to an academic study released in September.
The government has confirmed so far just over 390,000 infections and about 4,700 deaths.
However, organizations such as Human Rights Watch question the official balance sheets, considering that there is a high underreporting.
© 2021 AFP
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