Panama, Nov 25 (Prensa Latina) Panamanian health authorities today have agreements with pharmaceutical companies Pzifer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca to purchase vaccines against Covid-19, said physician Eduardo Ortega. In an interview with TVN Noticias, the member of the Vaccine Consortium against this disease assured that the agreement is part of a bilateral negotiation, through which the country plans to purchase close to 5.5 million doses gradually.
We expect the first vaccines to arrive before March, another part between March and June, and the rest for the second semester of 2021, he said.
He recalled that in the case of Pfizer, its vaccine candidate was submitted for approval by the U.S. regulatory authorities, while AstraZeneca's will probably be presented to the European regulator within one or two weeks, so one of the two could be approved by early or mid-December.
Ortega explained that the vaccination strategy in Panama contemplates the application of two doses to more than 65 percent of the population, since so far it does not contemplate the immunization of children and pregnant women, a segment that represents about one million people.
We need more than 70 percent of Panamanians to be vaccinated to stop this pandemic, to avoid hospitalizations and deaths, to open the economy and for our country to return to the post-pandemic reality,' said the expert, who also stated that they have another multilateral agreement with Covax, system of the World Health Organization, for a fourth vaccine, still to be defined.
Last week, the Panamanian government announced that it will allocate 48 million dollars for the acquisition of the vaccine against Covid-19, a disease that totals 156,930 infections and 2,986 deaths since the confirmation of the first case last March.
sus/abo/mem/npg/gdc
We expect the first vaccines to arrive before March, another part between March and June, and the rest for the second semester of 2021, he said.
He recalled that in the case of Pfizer, its vaccine candidate was submitted for approval by the U.S. regulatory authorities, while AstraZeneca's will probably be presented to the European regulator within one or two weeks, so one of the two could be approved by early or mid-December.
Ortega explained that the vaccination strategy in Panama contemplates the application of two doses to more than 65 percent of the population, since so far it does not contemplate the immunization of children and pregnant women, a segment that represents about one million people.
We need more than 70 percent of Panamanians to be vaccinated to stop this pandemic, to avoid hospitalizations and deaths, to open the economy and for our country to return to the post-pandemic reality,' said the expert, who also stated that they have another multilateral agreement with Covax, system of the World Health Organization, for a fourth vaccine, still to be defined.
Last week, the Panamanian government announced that it will allocate 48 million dollars for the acquisition of the vaccine against Covid-19, a disease that totals 156,930 infections and 2,986 deaths since the confirmation of the first case last March.
sus/abo/mem/npg/gdc
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