By Maximilian Heath and Anton Zverev
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – Russia delivered the first batch of its Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine to Bolivia on Thursday, along with a larger shipment to neighboring Argentina, as Moscow appears to play a key role in launching the vaccine in region, despite delivery delays.
A plane with 240,000 doses of the vaccine arrived in Argentina, of which 20,000 doses went to Bolivia, where President Luis Arce was waiting to receive delivery in La Paz. Bolivia will be the second country in Latin America to launch the Russian vaccine.
“As of tomorrow, distribution begins. There are 20,000 vaccines and two doses for each person,” presidential spokesman Jorge Richter told reporters. “They will be for the sectors most exposed and on the front line of contagion”.
Argentina had already received two shipments, each with 300,000 vaccines, although it received far less from the Russian vaccine than it originally expected.
The country’s state airline, Aerolineas Argentinas, which flew the shipment, said in a tweet after the doses arrived that “the unloading has started. The doses will be stored in the Airbus warehouse, packaged in Thermobox (refrigerated boxes).”
An airline spokesman told Reuters earlier that the last shipment of 220,000 doses to Argentina was split equally between the first and second doses of the two-stage vaccine.
Argentine deliveries fall short of the 5 million doses that health officials said they expected to receive in January from Russia.
From Buenos Aires, Bolivia’s national airline BOA took its share of the cargo to fly to La Paz.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which markets Sputnik V, and the Gamaleya Research Institute, which developed it, said on Wednesday that supplies to Latin America could be delayed by up to three weeks, as the production capacity has increased.
RDIF declined to comment on the latest upload.
Argentina had not received notification of the size of the last batch of 220,000 doses before it was sent, Carla Vizzotti told the state news agency Telam.
“We are super careful until we have confirmation, due to the particular dynamics of the global vaccine supply,” she said, adding that she expects more to arrive “in the coming days and weeks”.
Argentina administered 272,323 people with the first dose of the Sputnik V vaccine and 45,710 people with the second dose, according to the ministry’s figures. The country also approved the vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca.
There were 1.9 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and about 47,500 deaths in Argentina.
Arce, from Bolivia, wrote on Twitter that the 20,000 doses his country was receiving were more than what was initially agreed for delivery in January. He said the vaccines would be administered to frontline health workers.
Bolivia had more than 200,000 cases of COVID-19 and more than 10,000 deaths.
(Reporting by Maximilian Heath, Anton Zverev and Aslinn Laing; Additional reporting by Polina Nikolskaya, Rinat Sagdiev and Polina Ivanova in Moscow and Danny Ramos in La Paz; Editing by Edmund Blair, Marguerita Choy and Peter Cooney)