Iván Solano Leiva, infectologist and member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, confirmed that the Government is already managing the delivery of Pfizer in the first months of 2021
AstraZeneca, with which the Government of El Salvador has an agreement to administer two million doses, has not yet conducted further studies to verify the operation and effectiveness of its vaccine against COVID-19, so it seems “impossible that we will have it in El Salvador. Salvador in the first quarter of the year “, explained on Wednesday, the infectologist Iván Solano Leiva, in an interview for Channel 33.
The application of AstraZeneca in the first quarter of 2021 was an announcement made by the President of the Republic, Nayib Bukele, in November last year, although the President explained that the agreement made the company perform clinical tests on thousands of patients.
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Specialist Solano Leiva confirmed that, as a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (CAPI) working with the Ministry of Health, he is aware that last Wednesday the Salvadoran government was given technical approval to apply the Pfizer BionTech Vaccine in the country, as Dr. Milton Brizuela, president of the Medical College, had told El Diario de Hoy.
The delay in AstraZeneca has led the Government to negotiate with BionTech Pfizer, said Solano Leiva, adding that “we are more likely to have it in the first quarter of 2021”, as expected by the Executive, but with the British drug- Swedish with whom he had already negotiated.
At this time, the Government has not made public the amounts involved in purchasing any of these vaccines and has only announced that their application in the country will not have an additional cost to the population and also each person can decide whether to accept or not. injection.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is already distributed and applied in European countries, and one of the main remains to be transported and stored is that it must be kept at a temperature of -70 degrees Celsius, which is why a “cold chain” is needed. deteriorated.
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All this is already taken into account in the discussions between the company and the government, said Solano Leiva. “Pfizer will be responsible for ensuring all the logistics, transport and supervision of the cold chain, which with this vaccine is quite difficult, until storage in our country,” he explained.
The infectologist stressed that the vaccine, as it happens in other countries, will not be available to the entire population from the beginning, but will give priority to top medical staff, the elderly and people with chronic diseases, more vulnerable to infection.
The government intends to buy two million doses of Pfizer vaccine, and within this logistics would be covered 750,000 people who fall into this priority group “, added Solano Leiva.
Dr. Alfonso Rosales, also an infectious disease physician and international consultant, added in the same interview that the public can trust this vaccine because studies show that it is quite safe.
“All vaccines cause side effects, but for now, both Pfizer and Moderna are behaving as expected, we should not be afraid to use them, they are just as safe,” he said, adding that studies indicates that “one in a million” cases of serious effects occur.