Chile has dazzled the world these days. The South American country has become the Latin American champion in vaccination against COVID-19 and is among the top five nations leading the immunization against the virus.
Since the start of its mass vaccination campaign in February, Chile has vaccinated more than 25% of its population and globally is only behind Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. And this nation of 19 million people aims to immunize 80% of its population by the end of June.
What is behind the success of Chile?
Officials and experts say the explanation lies in early and simultaneous negotiations with several pharmaceuticals, previous contacts with some companies and a solid vaccination system that covers the entire 4,000 kilometers of its territory.
During the first months of the pandemic, in 2020, the headlines were that Chile had become one of the countries most affected by the virus in the region, behind only Brazil and Peru, and criticism abounded in the authorities for being unable to ‘locate and keep people isolated to prevent the spread of VOCID-19.
In parallel, however, another story unfolded that few people knew, which had begun many weeks earlier and which some time later would help ensure quick access to vaccines.
Science Minister Andres Couve told AP that formal negotiations with pharmaceutical companies began in April, a month after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared VOCID-19 a pandemic. By May, he said, President Sebastián Piñera had already been presented with a roadmap with some plans to acquire the vaccines once they were developed, and this included considering country participation in clinical trials.
But part of the story to get the vaccines dates back to October 2019, in China, two months before the Asian nation announced the first cases of the new coronavirus. This month, Dr. Alexis Kalergis, a biochemist and director of the Millennium Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy at Catholic University, attended an international immunology conference in Beijing with two Chilean colleagues.
Here he met with several expert colleagues, including some from the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech Ltd, which would soon be key to the development of the new coronavirus vaccine.
When China announced in January 2020 that it had identified a new virus, Kalergis thought of the Sinovac experts he saw in Beijing and began contacting
“We work on vaccines and we know that the kind of health tools required for such a disease are precisely vaccines,” Kalergis told the AP. “And taking advantage of the experience, the contacts and the interest we show was that it was established, it was that we started conversations with Sinovac.”
The immunologist said he spoke with the rector of the Catholic University, Ignacio Sanchez, about the need to involve the government. Sanchez met with officials from the ministries of health, science and the chancellery, to whom he explained the need to start formal negotiations as soon as possible. Then came April and negotiations began.
Rodrigo Yáñez, Undersecretary for International Economic Relations, was in charge of the negotiations. From the beginning, he told the PA, it was agreed to talk to different companies, laboratories and global bodies, such as the UN, and always without closing to any possibility.
“The centrality of the vaccination program in Chile and of the vaccine research strategy has been precisely this pragmatism, this flexibility,” he told the AP. They always looked for, he added, “different alternatives and not put all the eggs in the same basket.”
In June, long before any Latin American country, Chile had already secured a contract with Sinovac, which promised to make preferential deliveries once the vaccine was authorized, Kalergis said.
In addition, in December 2020, Chile was part of the Sinovac vaccine clinical trials with 2,300 people, mostly medical staff. The South American nation also participated in the trials of AstraZeneca, Janssen and Cansino, another Chinese pharmaceutical company.
Chile has currently purchased just over 35 million doses. So far, Sinovac has promised 14 million doses, Pfizer 10.1 million and AstraZeneca four million, in addition to which the government acquired another 7.8 million through the international mechanism COVAX, which seeks equitable vaccine access to the world . So far, authorities have invested $ 200 million and estimate to inject another $ 100 million.
In Chile it has gone so well, that last week he gave 20,000 doses of Sinovac in Paraguay and an equal number in Ecuador, to be used in health personnel.
For Yáñez, the main Chilean negotiator, “it is perfectly possible that the country will also somehow articulate and triangulate … supporting management to other countries that may not have the capacity to be able to manage this purchase.”
No Latin American country has managed to vaccinate as many people as Chile. It is far behind Brazil, with 4% of its population and Argentina, with about 3%.
So far, Chinese doses have become the mainstay of the Chilean vaccination program.
The country received just over 21,000 doses of Pfizer in December, less than promised, and began vaccinating health workers. But in January he received the first four million vaccines from Sinovac and then accelerated everything.
It began mass vaccination on February 3 and since then Chile has vaccinated more than 100,000 people almost every day, although this week it reached the record of 415,000 immunized in a single day.
On Wednesday, the country also achieved the global daily record of 1.3 vaccines per 100 inhabitants, followed by Israel with 1.04 doses, according to records from “Our World in Data”, a platform developed jointly with researchers from the Oxfors University and the non-profit organization “Global Change Data Lab”.
Chile records more than 885,000 confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic and more than 21,500 deaths.
“Chile’s primary health care system is the most important in Latin America” and during the vaccination process “has shown its absolute strength,” Dr. Mercedes Lopez Nitsche, director of the Immunology Program, the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chile and the national program Millennium Core of Immunology and Immunotherapy.
This is not the first time Chile has shown the strength of its vaccination system: between March and April 2020, as the virus spread around the world, the country vaccinated eight million people against the flu.
The Deputy Director of the Pan American Health Organization, Jarbas Barbosa, attributed the Chilean success to the fact that “it is a high-income country” because it had “good planning and used in an intelligent way. binding the resources it has to make bilateral agreements with some producers “.
Mario Patiño, a 75-year-old employee of a travel agency, was one of those who received the first dose of Sinovac in February in Lo Padro, a poor commune on the outskirts of Santiago.
“It was all perfect, all fast, excellent care, well organized,” said the man, who was scheduled to receive the second dose this weekend. For him, he added, getting the vaccine means “being calmer.”