Chile is Latin America’s vaccination champion
“Everything was perfect, fast, with an excellent service, well-organized.” Mario Patiño, 75 While getting his second shot Saturday
SANTIAGO, Chile – After being among the world’s nations hit hardest by COVID-19, Chile is now near the top among countries at vaccinating its population against the virus.
With more than 25% 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 criticized over its inability to trace and isolate infected people.
Government officials and health experts say the key to success 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 Organization.
In the first months of the pandemic, the headlines in Chile were bleak. The country’s intensive care units almost full, and the government was unable to control the virus’s spread despite restrictions that included mandatory lockdowns.
But another story was developing in parallel that few knew about, one that had begun months before and would guarantee Chile fast access to vaccines.
Andrés Couve, Chile’s minister of science, told The Associated Press that 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 Sebastián Piñera, 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. The effort was helped by contacts made months earlier in China, including experts from the Chinese pharmaceutical Sinovac Biotech Ltd.
By June, Chile had secured a contract with Sinovac to be part of its clinical trials. Sinovac agreed to deliver an early batch once the vaccine was authorized.
Rodrigo Yáñez, undersecretary for international economic relations and 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 was part of a Sinovac clinical trial that started in December and involved 2,300 medical workers. The government has not published its results, saying only that they were good. Trials for vaccines by AstraZeneca, Janssen and the Chinese pharmaceutical CanSino also were done in Chile.
Chile received its first vaccine doses in December, about 21,000 from Pfizer, but they were fewer than promised. The country immediately began vaccinating medical workers. By the end of January, Chile received the first 4 million doses from Sinovac and was able to speed up inoculation. Widespread vaccination started in February. Chile was administering more than 100,000 shots almost daily since early February, and that has more than tripled.
No other country in Latin America has had anything near Chile’s success. Brazil, for example, has vaccinated only 4% of its population.
Health Minister Enrique París said Chile has now secured 35 million doses to vaccinate 15 million people, and it’s already helping other countries. This month, Chilean authorities donated 20,000 Sinovac doses to Paraguay and the same amount to Ecuador.
Mario Patiño, 75, was among the first to be vaccinated with a Sinovac dose in February at a school in Lo Prado, a poor residential area of Santiago.
“Everything was perfect, fast, with an excellent service, well-organized,” said Patiño, who was getting his second shot on Saturday. “For me, the vaccine means to be calmer.”