SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) – After being one of the world’s hardest hit countries under COVID-19, Chile is now close to the top among countries that have vaccinated its population against the virus.
With more than 25% of the population receiving at least one shot, the 19 million country on the South American Pacific coast is the champion of Latin America, and globally it is just behind Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
This is far from the beginning of the pandemic, when Chile was criticized for its inability to detect and isolate infected people.
What, then, is the secret to its success?
Government officials and health experts say it was the country’s early negotiations with vaccine manufacturers, as well as its previous experience with robust vaccination programs, a record praised by the World Health Organization.
During the first months of the pandemic, headlines in Chile were bleak, with the country’s intensive care units almost full and the government unable to control the spread of the virus, despite restrictions that include mandatory closures.
But another story unfolds in parallel that few people know about, one that started months earlier and would later provide quick access to vaccines to Chile.
Chilean science minister Andrés Couve told The Associated Press that formal negotiations with vaccine-producing companies began last April, just a month after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.
By May, Couve said, a team of experts and officials had submitted a plan to President Sebastián Piñera, including a roadmap on how to use the country’s network of trade agreements and previous contacts with pharmaceutical companies to get vaccines once it has been developed. Recommendations include being part of clinical trials.
This effort was aided by contacts made in China months earlier. In October 2019, the Chilean biochemist dr. Alexis Kalergis traveled to Beijing with two Chilean colleagues for an international congress on immunology. There, Kalergis has experts from the Chinese pharmaceutical Sinovac Biotech Ltd.
Kalergis has already approached Sinovac about the work on vaccine research. When China announced in January 2020 that it had identified a new virus, and the world saw within a few weeks that it was spreading around the world, Kalergis knew he needed to reach out to his colleagues in Sinovac.
“Taking advantage of our experience, the contacts and the interest we expressed … we started conversations with Sinovac,” says Kalergis, director of the Milenio Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy at the Catholic University of Chile.
He spoke to Sinovac colleagues in January and February 2020 and then went to the dean of the Catholic University Ignacio Sánchez with the details and said that it should be handed over to the government.
Sánchez approached Chile’s health minister and foreign minister, calling for early negotiations with Sinovac and other pharmaceuticals and for Chile to be part of their clinical trials. The ministers agreed and the Chilean government started making diplomatic contacts.
By June, long before any other country in Latin America, Chile had signed a contract with Sinovac, which agreed to deliver an early quantity once the vaccine was approved, Kalergis said.
Rodrigo Yáñez, secretary of international economic relations and chief negotiator with companies to get the vaccines, said Chile understood from the beginning that it had to work with different pharmaceutical companies at the same time.
“We looked at different alternatives and did not put all the eggs in the same basket,” he said.
Chile was part of a Sinovac clinical trial that began in December and involved 2,300 medical workers. The government did not publish its results and only said that it was good.
Vaccination trials by AstraZeneca, Janssen and the Chinese pharmaceutical CanSino were also conducted in Chile, and the results were not disclosed.
Chile received its first dose of vaccine in December, about 21,000 from Pfizer, but it was less than promised. The country immediately vaccinated medical workers. By the end of January, Chile had received the first 4 million doses of Sinovac and the vaccination could be accelerated. Massive vaccination began in February.
Since the beginning of February, Chile has fired more than 100,000 shots almost daily, and this has more than tripled this week.
According to Our World in Data, a collaboration between researchers at the University of Oxford and the non-profit Global Change Data Lab, it set a daily world record of 1.3 shots per 100 inhabitants on Wednesday, followed by Israel with 1.04 doses.
No other country in Latin America has had anything close to the success of Chile. Brazil, for example, vaccinated only 4% of its population, and Argentina about 3%.
Health Minister Enrique París said Chile had now received 35 million doses to vaccinate 15 million people, and that it was helping all other countries. Earlier this month, Chilean authorities donated 20,000 doses of Sinovac to Paraguay and gave the same amount to Ecuador.
Chile has “had good planning and used the resources it has wisely to make bilateral agreements with some producers,” Jarbas Barbosa, deputy director of the Pan-American Health Organization, said this week.
This is not the first time that Chile is doing a successful vaccination program. Last year, between March and April, when the virus surfaced, Chilean authorities vaccinated 8 million people against the flu.
Mario Patiño, 75, was one of the first to be vaccinated with a dose of Sinovac at a school in Lo Prado, a poor residential area in Santiago, in February.
“Everything was perfect, fast, with excellent service, well organized,” said Patiño, who gets his second shot on Saturday. “For me, the vaccine means being calmer.”