SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) – After being among the nations most affected by COVID-19, Chile is now close to the first place in vaccinating its population against the virus.
With more than 25% of its population having received at least one shot, the 19 million country on the Pacific coast of South America is the champion of Latin America and, globally, is behind Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
This is a long way from the beginning of the pandemic, when Chile was criticized for its inability to track and isolate infected people.
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Government officials and health experts say it was the country’s initial negotiations with vaccine producers, as well as its previous experience with robust vaccination programs, a record praised by the World Health Organization.
During the first months of the pandemic, the headlines in Chile were disheartening, with the country’s intensive care units nearly full and the government unable to control the spread of the virus, despite restrictions that included mandatory blockages.
But at the same time, another story was unfolding that few knew about, a story that started months earlier and that later would guarantee Chile rapid access to vaccines.
Andrés Couve, the Chilean Minister of Science, told the Associated Press that formal negotiations with vaccine companies began last April, just a month after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.
In May, Couve said, a team of experts and officials presented a plan to President Sebastián Piñera, including a roadmap on how to use the country’s network of trade agreements and his previous contacts with pharmaceutical companies to obtain vaccines after they were developed. The recommendations included being part of clinical trials.
This effort was aided by contacts made months ago in China. In October 2019, Chilean biochemist Dr. Alexis Kalergis traveled to Beijing with two Chilean colleagues for an international conference on immunology. There, Kalergis met with experts from Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech Ltd.
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 in a few weeks the world saw it spreading across the globe, Kalergis knew that he needed to contact his colleagues at Sinovac.
“Taking advantage of our experience, the contacts and the interest we express … we started conversations with Sinovac,” said Kalergis, director of the Millennium Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy at the Catholic University of Chile.
He spoke with colleagues at Sinovac in January and February 2020, then went to Dean Ignacio Sánchez Catholic University with the details, saying that they needed to be passed on to the government.
Sánchez approached the Minister of Health and the Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Chile, requesting advance negotiations with Sinovac and other pharmaceutical products and for Chile to participate in its clinical tests. Ministers agreed and the Chilean government began to make diplomatic contacts.
In June, long before any other Latin American country, Chile had signed a contract with Sinovac, which agreed to deliver an advance batch as soon as the vaccine was authorized, Kalergis said.
Rodrigo Yáñez, undersecretary for international economic relations and the main negotiator with companies to obtain vaccines, said that Chile understood from the beginning that it needed to work with different pharmaceutical companies at the same time.
“We looked for different alternatives and we didn’t put all the eggs in one basket,” he said.
Chile was part of a Sinovac clinical trial that started in December and involved 2,300 medical workers. The government did not publish its results, saying only that they were good.
Trials of vaccines from AstraZeneca, Janssen and the Chinese pharmaceutical company CanSino were also carried out in Chile, and the results were also not disclosed.
Chile received its first doses of vaccine in December, about 21,000 from Pfizer, but they were less than promised. The country immediately started vaccinating medical workers. At the end of January, Chile received the first 4 million doses of Sinovac and was able to accelerate inoculation. The massive vaccination started in February.
Chile has been administering more than 100,000 injections almost daily since the beginning of February, and that has more than tripled this week.
On Wednesday, it reached a global daily record of 1.3 doses per 100 inhabitants, followed by Israel with 1.04 doses, according to Our World in Data, a collaboration between researchers at Oxford University and the laboratory without for profit Global Change Data Lab.
No other country in Latin America has had anything close to Chile’s success. Brazil, for example, vaccinated only 4% of its population, and Argentina about 3%.
Health Minister Enrique París said that Chile has already guaranteed 35 million doses to vaccinate 15 million people and is already helping other countries. Earlier this month, Chilean authorities donated 20,000 doses of Sinovac to Paraguay and the same amount to Ecuador.
Chile had “good planning and used its resources wisely to make bilateral agreements with some producers,” Jarbas Barbosa, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization, said this week.
This is not the first time that Chile has successfully conducted a vaccination program. Last year, between March and April, when the virus was emerging, Chilean authorities vaccinated 8 million people against the flu.
Mario Patiño, 75, was one of the first to be vaccinated with a dose of Sinovac in February at a school in Lo Prado, a poor residential area in Santiago.
“Everything was perfect, fast, with excellent service, well organized,” said Patiño, who was taking the second chance on Saturday. “For me, the vaccine means to be calmer.”