Chile learns from early Covid mistakes to secure vaccines
After being among the world’s hardest-hit nations with Covid-19, Chile is now near the top among countries at vaccinating its population against the virus.
With more than 25 per cent of its people having received at least one shot, the country of 19 million on South America’s Pacific coast is the champion of Latin America, and globally it is just behind Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
That’s a far cry from the beginning of the pandemic, when Chile was criticised over its inability to trace and isolate infected people.
So what is the secret to its success? Government officials and health experts say it was the country’s early negotiations with vaccine producers, as well as its past experience with robust vaccination programs, a record praised by the World Health Organisation.
During the first months of the pandemic, the headlines in Chile were bleak, with the country’s intensive care units almost full and the government unable to control the virus’s spread despite restrictions that included mandatory lockdowns.
But another story was developing in parallel that few people knew about, one that had begun months before and would later guarantee Chile fast access to vaccines.
Andre´s Couve, Chile’s minister of science, said formal negotiations with vaccine-producing companies started last April, only a month after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic.
By May, Couve said, a team of experts and officials presented a plan to President Sebastia´n Pin˜era, including a road map about how to use the country’s network of trade agreements and its previous contacts with pharmaceutical companies to get vaccines once they were developed. Recommendations included being part of clinical trials. This effort was helped by contacts made months earlier in China. In October 2019, Chilean biochemist Dr Alexis Kalergis had traveled to Beijing with two Chilean colleagues for an international congress on immunology.
There Kalergis met experts from the Chinese pharmaceutical Sinovac Biotech.
Kalergis had already approached Sinovac about working on vaccine research.
So when China announced in January 2020 that it had identified a new virus, and within weeks the world saw it spreading around the globe, Kalergis knew he needed to reach out to his colleagues at Sinovac.
By June Chile had secured a contract with Sinovac, which agreed to deliver an early batch once the vaccine was authorised, Kalergis said.
Rodrigo Ya´n˜ez, lead negotiator with companies to get the vaccines, said Chile understood from the beginning that it needed 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 received its first vaccine doses in December, some 21,000 from Pfizer, but they were fewer than promised. By the end of January, Chile received the first 4 million doses from Sinovac and was able to speed up inoculation. Massive vaccination started in February.
On Thursday, it reached a daily global record of 1.3 shots per 100 inhabitants, followed by Israel with 1.04 doses.