Since August last year, his government had reserved more than 6 million doses and they have only received just over 1.2 million.
The president of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei, charged this Tuesday against the Covax mechanism of the World Health Organization (WHO) for the delays in the delivery of vaccines against covid-19 and assured that the system “is a failure.”
“As I told the Secretary General of the United Nations (António Guterres) in his office, Covax is a failure. There are written commitments where it is seen that they have not fulfilled what we asked for from the beginning, “said the Guatemalan president when he left a work meeting.
According to the Central American leader, the authorities of the Covax mechanism, the global access fund for covid-19 vaccines, had promised to deliver a batch of doses from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer this Monday, but this did not happen.
“Now they come and say that due to a logistics problem for a holiday in Belgium they will come during the weekend, without specifying the day or time,” said Giammattei.
He added that he will prepare a “very, very serious” proposal before the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the WHO, “for the fifth time, in which it cannot be that they promise the countries that one day it will come, they will send one the confirmations and everything and nothing; we do pay, but they don’t give it as it should be ”.
Giammattei recalled that since August last year his Government had reserved more than 6 million doses, but to date it has received a total of 1,258,320 doses, of which 724,800 have been from the British pharmaceutical AstraZeneca and 533,530 from Pfizer.
“With everyone they have been bad. We have protested four times and this will be the fifth, because the system is not working, ”said the Guatemalan president.
Since the first 5,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine donated by Israel entered Guatemala on February 25, the nation chaired by Giammattei has entered more than 12.9 million doses of vaccines, mostly the product of donations from the United States. Spain, Mexico, India and Israel.
The Guatemalan government has vaccinated 5.59 million people with at least one dose of anticovid-19 vaccines; of these, 3.64 million have also been immunized with the complete two-dose vaccination scheme, in a country of more than 16.3 million inhabitants. (I)
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