Chilean President Sebastián Piñera announced on Wednesday that vaccination against COVID-19 will start in the country this Thursday after the expected arrival of the first 10,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
“This morning, at 5:00 in the morning, the plane carrying the first 10,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech laboratory vaccine to our country took off from Belgium,” the president announced from La Moneda.
According to him, “the plane will arrive in Chile tomorrow around 7:00 in the morning and we are ready and prepared to be able to start a vaccination process.”
“This means that, starting tomorrow, Chile will begin its vaccination process, which will be carried out gradually, just as vaccine shipments will be arriving periodically and systematically in our country,” he said. president.
Piñera explained that Chile has managed to “secure more than 10 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and more than 10 million of the Sinovac vaccine (…) We will have more than 30 million doses of vaccine in the our country “.
To date, Chile has already had 589,189 confirmed cases, with 559,845 patients recovered, and 16,217 fatalities. There are currently 683 people hospitalized in the ICU, of whom 516 require mechanical breathing and 58 are in critical condition, according to the latest official data on Tuesday.