Peru began distributing China’s Sinopharm vaccine on Tuesday morning, and front-line health workers were given priority during the first phase of the launch.
The country has been involved in Sinopharm vaccine clinical trials since last year and becomes the first Latin American country to deploy the Chinese vaccine.
A group of doctors from Archbishop Loayza Hospital in Lima were the first to receive the vaccine on Tuesday morning, the Andean state news agency reported.
President Francisco Sagasti is expected to be vaccinated later Tuesday.
On Sunday, Peru received its first shipment of 300,000 doses of China’s Sinopharm coronavirus vaccine and expects to receive the remaining 700,000 doses on February 14th. The armed forces will be in charge of distributing the vaccine throughout the country.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Elizabeth Astete announced that her government had reached an agreement with Pfizer for the supply of 20 million doses of its vaccine, the Andean state news agency reported.
Astete told a congressional committee that 250,000 doses would arrive in March and at least 300,000 in April, Andina reported.
“We were assured that Peru will have received a minimum of 5,750,000 vaccines on July 1 and that supply will increase significantly to 20 million since then,” Astete said.
Astete also told lawmakers that his government signed an agreement to receive 6.6 million doses of Pfizer and AstraZeneca through the Covax program to vaccinate 20% of the population.
President Sagasti, who took office in November, has been criticized for delaying reaching vaccine supply agreements.
Peru currently has 1,186,698 confirmed cases of coronavirus and has recorded 42,308 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
The country has reported more than 6,000 cases a day, up from 2,000 cases a day in early January, while it also faces a shortage of intensive care unit (ICU) beds and oxygen during this new wave of pandemic.
Peru has the fifth highest Covid-19 case count in Latin America, after Brazil, Colombia, Argentina and Mexico according to JHU data.