“Our region, our world cannot control this coronavirus. “ The observation of Carissa Etienne, the director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a regional branch of the WHO, is clear: the year 2021, for Latin America and the Caribbean, will be worse than the previous one. if health measures are relaxed, while states are reluctant to impose further restrictions. After a brief and slight lull in October and November 2020, the number of contaminations and deaths has started to rise again. And many countries continue to break their own records: 1,803 deaths on January 21 in Mexico, 2,866 new cases in Bolivia on January 27.
The vaccination campaign has started slowly in this region of the world which has recorded a total of almost 600,000 deaths – more than a third of them in Brazil. Only Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador, out of the forty or so countries of the subcontinent, have started the injections, as the doses arrive, by drop.
The purchase of pharmaceutical products represents a major challenge for most of the economies hard hit by the epidemic: the region’s GDP fell by almost 8% on average in 2020. And this, especially since the rich countries have preempted an astronomical amount of doses (three-quarters of total reservations, according to the Global Health Innovation Center at Duke University in the United States).
So much so that the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, criticized this “Selfish approach” who “Endangers the poorest and most vulnerable in the world” : “I have to be frank. The world is on the brink of catastrophic moral failure ”, he lamented. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a consulting firm linked to the journal The Economist, no Latin American country will have ended its vaccination campaign before mid-2022, or even 2023 for eight of them.
Political stake
WHO has a program in place, Covax, to ensure fair and equitable access to vaccines globally. In the region, from Haiti to Bolivia, ten small countries will have free access and twenty-seven others at a preferential rate. But Covax will only be able to claim 2 billion doses for 2021, enough to cover, at best, only 20% of the populations concerned. And the first doses will not be delivered until March.
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