SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) – Having been one of the most affected countries in the world with COVID-19, Chile is now in the top position among countries in vaccinating its population against the virus.
With more than 25% of its population receiving at least one shot, the 19 million country on the South American Pacific coast is the champion of Latin America and, globally, is behind Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
This is far from the beginning of the pandemic, when Chile was criticized for its inability to track down and isolate infected people.
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Government officials and health experts say they were the country’s first negotiations with vaccine producers, as well as their past experience with robust vaccination programs, a record praised by the World Health Organization.
During the first months of the pandemic, headlines in Chile were devastating, with the country’s intensive care units almost full and the government unable to control the spread of the virus despite restrictions that included mandatory closures.
But at the same time, another story was unfolding that few people knew about, which had begun months earlier and which would later guarantee Chile quick access to vaccines.
Chile’s science minister Andres Couve told The Associated Press that formal negotiations with vaccine-producing companies began last April, just a month after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.
In May, Couve said, a team of experts and officials presented a plan to President Sebastián Piñera, which included a roadmap on how to use the country’s network of trade agreements and his previous contacts with pharmaceutical companies to obtain vaccines once developed. Recommendations include being part of clinical trials.
This effort was aided by contacts made months earlier in China. In October 2019, Chilean biochemist Dr. Alexis Kalergis had traveled to Beijing with two Chilean colleagues to hold an international conference on immunology. There, Kalergis met with experts from Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech Ltd.
Kalergis had already gone to Sinovac to work on vaccine research. So when China announced in January 2020 that it had identified a new virus and in a few weeks the world was seeing it spreading around the world, Kalergis knew it had to contact its Sinovac colleagues.
“Taking advantage of our experience, the contacts and the interest we expressed … we started conversations with Sinovac,” said Kalergis, director of the Milenio Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy at the Catholic University of Chile.
He spoke with Sinovac’s colleagues in January and February 2020 and then went to the dean of the Catholic University, Ignacio Sánchez, with the details, saying they needed to pass them on to the government.
Sanchez addressed the Minister of Health and the Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Chile, urging the first negotiations with Sinovac and other pharmaceuticals and for Chile to be part of its clinical trials. The ministers agreed and the Chilean government began to establish diplomatic contacts.
In June, long before any other Latin American country, Chile had secured a contract with Sinovac, which agreed to deliver an early batch once the vaccine was authorized, Kalergis said.
Rodrigo Yáñez, Undersecretary of International Economic Relations and chief negotiator with companies to obtain vaccines, said Chile understood from the outset that it was necessary to work with different pharmaceutical companies at the same time.
“We looked at different alternatives and didn’t put all the eggs in the same basket,” he said.
Chile was part of a Sinovac clinical trial that began in December and involved 2,300 medical workers. The government has not published their results, saying only that they were good.
Tests were also carried out in Chile for the vaccines of AstraZeneca, Janssen and the Chinese pharmaceutical company CanSino, but these results have not been revealed either.
Chile received the first doses of vaccine in December, some 21,000 from Pfizer, but they were less than promised. The country immediately began vaccinating medical workers. In late January, Chile received the first 4 million doses of Sinovac and was able to accelerate inoculation. Mass vaccination began in February.
Chile has been administering more than 100,000 shots almost daily since early February, and that tripled this week.
On Wednesday it reached a daily world record of 1.3 shots per 100 inhabitants, followed by Israel with 1.04 doses, according to Our World in Data, a collaboration between researchers at Oxford University and Global Change Data Lab, non-profit.
No other Latin American country has had anything close to Chile’s success. Brazil, for example, has only vaccinated 4% of its population and Argentina about 3%.
Health Minister Enrique Paris said Chile has now secured 35 million doses to vaccinate 15 million people and is already helping other countries. Earlier this month, Chilean authorities gave 20,000 doses of Sinovac to Paraguay and the same amount to Ecuador.
Chile had “good planning and used prudently the resources it has to make bilateral agreements with some producers,” Jarbas Barbosa, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization, said this week.
This is not the first time that Chile has carried out a successful vaccination program. Last year, between March and April, when the virus appeared, Chilean authorities vaccinated 8 million people against the flu.
Mario Patiño, 75, was one of the first to be vaccinated with a dose of Sinovac in February at a school in Lo Prado, a poor residential area of Santiago.
“Everything was perfect, fast, with excellent service, well organized,” said Patiño, who got his second shot on Saturday. “For me, the vaccine means being calmer.”