The President of Chile says he hopes to have vaccinated the country’s adult population by the end of June, with five million of the most risky cases vaccinated by the end of the month.
Speaking exclusively to CNN’s Julia Chatterley, Sebastián Piñera said, “We started negotiating the acquisitions of vaccines in April, May, and by now we have secured more than 36 million doses and that is enough to cover our whole population.”
“Our immunization program is a sound and solid one…we have vaccines and have capacity to distribute vaccines all over the country, to every corner of the country. Yesterday we vaccinated more than 300,000 people in one day. That’s why we are really pushing the process because we want to vaccinate our population as soon as possible,” he said.
“We are working hard to get herd immunity, and we hope to have it by midyear, before the end of June,” Piñera added.
Chile has largely been using the Chinese Sinovac vaccine which the President insists is safe, saying it was “approved by our own family health institute, we have made sure that it is safe and efficient. We sent our own people to China to confirm that it is safe and secure and therefore we’re confident.”
Piñera also called for greater international cooperation to tackle future pandemics, including strengthening the World Health Organization. He said “This pandemic has shown with two super powers, China and the US, instead of collaborating, they face each other, it doesn’t work. We need more collaboration, need better institutions.”