Colombia will begin its vaccination campaign against Covid-19 on Wednesday, President Ivan Duque said Monday.
Duke said during his daily televised speech that the government had decided to advance the vaccination schedule from Saturday. The campaign begins weeks after neighboring countries like Chile and Argentina began theirs.
Colombian health workers will be the first to receive the vaccine.
Colombia received its first shipment of 50,000 doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine on Monday.
Duque said the government had decided to start the vaccination campaign in two small towns in rural Colombia, Monteria and Sincelejo, to indicate that the vaccines are targeted nationwide.
Major cities such as Bogota, Medellin and Cali will begin vaccinating residents on Thursday.
Veronica Machado, a nurse in the intensive care unit at Sincelejo University Hospital, will be the first Colombian to receive her first inoculation on Wednesday, Duque said.
The Covid-19 outbreak in Colombia is the second worst in Latin America, according to a count of cases confirmed by Johns Hopkins University.
So far, 2,198,549 cases and 57,786 deaths have been reported in Colombia, according to Johns Hopkins