Colombia will begin its vaccination campaign against Covid-19 on Wednesday, President Ivan Duque said on Monday.
Duke said during his daily television speech that the government decided to postpone the vaccination schedule from Saturday. The campaign is starting weeks after neighboring countries like Chile and Argentina started theirs.
Colombian health professionals will be the first to receive the vaccine.
Colombia received its first shipment of 50,000 doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine on Monday.
Duque said the government decided to start the vaccination campaign in two small towns in rural Colombia, Monteria and Sincelejo, to signal that the vaccines are aimed at the whole country.
Big cities like Bogota, Medellín and Cali will start vaccinating residents on Thursday.
Veronica Machado, a nurse at the intensive care unit at Hospital Universitário Sincelejo, will be the first Colombian to receive her first vaccine on Wednesday, Duque said.
The Covid-19 outbreak in Colombia is the second worst in Latin America, according to a count of cases confirmed by Johns Hopkins University.
To date, 2,198,549 cases and 57,786 deaths have been reported in Colombia, according to Johns Hopkins