Head nurse Veronica Luz Machado, who for months has battled the coronavirus pandemic from an intensive care unit in the northern Colombian city of Sincelejo, became the first person in the Andean country to receive a COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday.
Beginning with Machado, Colombia will kick off its plan to immunise 35.2 million people with vaccines acquired through a raft of bilateral deals as well as the World Health Organization-backed COVAX mechanism.
“The pandemic really changed our lives completely, particularly for me and my colleagues, because we were facing an unknown virus, we didn’t know how to respond,” Machado, who works at Hospital Universitario, said in a government broadcast earlier this week, before receiving the first shot of Pfizer-BioNTech’s two-dose vaccine.
“It’s a risk that health workers face every day when we leave our homes to come to work in what we enjoy, in what we are passionate about. I was very afraid,” Machado, a nurse for more than two decades, added.
“Today begins a new chapter, in which this pandemic is defeated. This chapter begins with mass, safe, effective and free vaccination across the country,” said President Ivan Duque who attended Machado’s first injection.
The first phase of Colombia’s vaccinations will benefit healthcare personnel and those aged 80 and over.
The government plans to immunise one million people during the first month of inoculations, which it has described as the greatest public health challenge in the country’s history.
The first 50,000 Pfizer doses arrived in Colombia on Monday, while a second batch of 192,000 doses from China’s Sinovac Biotech is expected to arrive this weekend, Duque said in a message on Twitter earlier this week.
Meanwhile, Mexico, which has topped two million confirmed coronavirus cases and 175,000 deaths, has just begun vaccinating the elderly. Officials say some 189,000 doses had been administered in the first two days of the campaign. There are about 15.7 million people over 60 who need the shots.
On Tuesday, Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said Mexico would bring up the issue of unequal access to vaccines among nations at the UN Security Council on Wednesday.
Ebrard complained that countries that produce vaccines have had far greater access to the shots than those that do not.
Rio de Janeiro halted new vaccinations for a week on Wednesday due to a shortage of doses, one of a growing number of Brazilian cities that have run low on supplies and are demanding help from Brazil’s federal government.
City officials in Rio said they will continue to deliver second doses to those who have already been injected once, but have paused new shots for the elderly.
Other state capitals have had to adopt similar strategies, such as Salvador, in the northeastern state of Bahia, and Cuiaba, in Mato Grosso state. Looming shortages have also been reported in at least four other capitals, according to Brazilian newspaper O Globo.
“We are ready and we have already vaccinated 244,852 people,” he said on his official Twitter profile. “We just need the vaccine to arrive.”