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Exclusive | Chile’s big coronavirus vaccine bet on China’s Sinovac shots
- The South American country hopes to reach herd immunity by the middle of the year and is nearly halfway to vaccinating its population
- The Chinese jab has played a major part in the campaign, despite not releasing final phase data
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The talks began as far back as May last year.
At the time Chile had one of the highest coronavirus totals in Latin America, with some 70,000 confirmed cases pushing the country’s health system “very close to the limit”.
That is when the country’s health authorities started discussions with developers of potential vaccines around the world to conduct clinical trials in Chile and open up access to vaccines for a later national roll-out.
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Today, Chile has one of the highest rates of vaccination against Covid-19, an achievement that officials attribute to an early action plan to procure doses from multiple sources but particularly pharmaceutical companies in China – which, controversially have yet to release data from final phase clinical trials.
More than 6.6 million of the 19 million people in Chile have had at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine and more than 3.5 million – or nearly one-fifth – have had both doses. In comparison, only 2.1 per cent of neighbouring Brazil’s more than 210 million people have received two vaccine shots.
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