A few days after receiving his first dose of coronavirus vaccine made in China, Rodrigo Jordán fell ill and tested positive for Covid-19. The 61-year-old man was hospitalized near his home in the Chilean capital, Santiago, for nine days and needed extra oxygen to transmit himself.
Across Chile, which has organized one of the fastest vaccination campaigns in the world using the vaccine made by Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech Ltd., health authorities are struggling to cope with an increase in new infections and deaths.
More than 7.6 million people, half of Chile’s adult population, have already received at least one dose of vaccine, most made by the Chinese pharmacist, making the country a real testing ground for a vaccine that Beijing supplies countries in the developing world.
The problem, according to public health officials, was that people generally overestimated the effectiveness of the vaccine after just one of the two recommended doses and moved to ease pandemic control restrictions too soon.
“With one dose, we know that protection is very weak,” said Claudia Cortés, an infectious disease expert at the Santa Maria de Santiago Clinic, where about 10 percent of Covid-19 patients at her hospital have been shot. . “It has not been clearly explained that he needs two doses, which is to be expected.”