Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, also deputy Cilia Flores, received the first dose of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine against covid-19 on Saturday, as announced last week.
“My first dose, I have been vaccinated,” Maduro said in a video broadcast from the multi-state channel Telesur that broadcast the moment of the vaccination of the president and his wife.
The president was vaccinated after, he assured, 60% of the Russian drug that arrived in the country on February 13 by plane from the Venezuelan state of Conviasa was applied to medical personnel.
Maduro expressed confidence and “confidence” in this vaccine, reiterating that on Monday the 500,000 Chinese Sinopharm vaccines that arrived in the country last Monday and which, unlike the Russian ones, will be delivered in a single dose.
As Maduro explained, among the priority sectors to be vaccinated are health workers, government agencies, deputies, security forces and vulnerable people or those with morbidity.
His government has only reported an agreement for 10 million vaccines with Russia and the country at this point, 100,000 doses have been received to date.
No details of the deal with China are known, but Venezuela has already received 500,000 doses, news that the government has attributed as an achievement amid the economic sanctions that have prevented it from accessing resources in the United States and the United Kingdom .
The president hopes that the mass vaccination of the population will begin in April, although he denounced this Friday that ten countries, without explicitly indicating this, are hoarding vaccines and that there are also problems with their production.
“I had calculated April as the month for vaccination expansion, I hope we stick with it, because there are problems in the production of vaccines in the world and vaccines in the world are monopolized by only 10 countries, they are monopolizing 90 % of the vaccines, prevention is key, ”he said.
Venezuela has registered a total of 141,356 confirmed covid-19 cases since the start of the pandemic a year ago, of which only 6,531 are active.
The country also has 1,371 deaths from this disease.