Head nurse Veronica Luz Machado, who for months has battled the coronavirus pandemic from an intensive care unit within the northern Colombian metropolis of Sincelejo, turned the first particular person within the Andean nation to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday.
Starting with Machado, Colombia will kick off its plan to immunise 35.2 million individuals with vaccines acquired via a raft of bilateral offers in addition to the World Well being Group-backed COVAX mechanism.
“The pandemic actually modified our lives utterly, notably for me and my colleagues, as a result of we had been dealing with an unknown virus, we didn’t know reply,” Machado, who works at Hospital Universitario, mentioned in a authorities broadcast earlier this week, earlier than receiving the primary shot of Pfizer-BioNTech’s two-dose vaccine.
“It’s a danger that well being employees face day by day once we go away our houses to return to work in what we get pleasure from, in what we’re captivated with. I used to be very afraid,” Machado, a nurse for greater than twenty years, added.
For Machado, the vaccine brings hope following nearly a 12 months of coronavirus instances in Colombia, which has reported greater than 2.2 million infections and 57,949 deaths, in accordance with knowledge compiled by Johns Hopkins College. The nation has a inhabitants of about 50 million individuals.
“In the present day begins a brand new chapter, by which this pandemic is defeated. This chapter begins with mass, secure, efficient and free vaccination throughout the nation,” mentioned President Ivan Duque who attended Machado’s first injection.
The first section of Colombia’s vaccinations will profit healthcare personnel and people aged 80 and over.
The federal government plans to immunise a million individuals through the first month of inoculations, which it has described as the best public well being problem within the nation’s historical past.
The primary 50,000 Pfizer doses arrived in Colombia on Monday, whereas a second batch of 192,000 doses from China’s Sinovac Biotech is anticipated to reach this weekend, Duque mentioned in a message on Twitter earlier this week.
In the meantime, Mexico, which has topped two million confirmed coronavirus instances and 175,000 deaths, has simply begun vaccinating the aged. Officers say some 189,000 doses had been administered within the first two days of the marketing campaign. There are about 15.7 million individuals over 60 who want the pictures.
Mexico has acquired solely about 1.9 million doses of the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines to date, sufficient for about a million individuals in a nation of 126 million.
On Tuesday, International Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard mentioned Mexico would carry up the problem of unequal entry to vaccines amongst nations on the UN Safety Council on Wednesday.
Ebrard complained that nations that produce vaccines have had far higher entry to the pictures than these that don’t.
Rio de Janeiro halted new vaccinations for every week on Wednesday as a result of a scarcity of doses, certainly one of a rising variety of Brazilian cities which have run low on provides and are demanding assist from Brazil’s federal authorities.
Metropolis officers in Rio mentioned they are going to proceed to ship second doses to those that have already been injected as soon as, however have paused new pictures for the aged.
Different state capitals have needed to undertake related methods, equivalent to Salvador, within the northeastern state of Bahia, and Cuiaba, in Mato Grosso state. Looming shortages have additionally been reported in a minimum of 4 different capitals, in accordance with Brazilian newspaper O Globo.
Officers say vaccines for brand spanking new recipients ran out partly as a result of that they had pushed ahead their schedule by one week after receiving a recent lot of doses. Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes mentioned on Monday that further pictures won’t be delivered earlier than subsequent week.
“We’re prepared and we’ve already vaccinated 244,852 individuals,” he mentioned on his official Twitter profile. “We simply want the vaccine to reach.”