10:58 p.m. ET, February 15, 2021
Colombia to begin Covid-19 vaccinations on Wednesday
From CNN’s Stefano Pozzebon in Bogotá, Colombia, and Taylor Barnes in Atlanta
A soldier stands guard as DHL company vans transport a batch of doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine to the Free Trade Zone to be stored in freezers on February 15, in Bogota, Colombia.
Guillermo Legaria/Getty Images
Colombia will begin its Covid-19 vaccination campaign on Wednesday, President Ivan Duque said on Monday.
Duque said during his daily televised address that the government had decided to move the vaccination schedule forward from Saturday. The campaign is beginning weeks after neighboring countries like Chile and Argentina started theirs.
Colombian health care workers will be the first to receive the vaccine.
Colombia received its first shipment of 50,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on Monday.
Duque said the government had decided to kick-start the vaccination campaign in two small cities in rural Colombia, Monteria and Sincelejo, to signal that the vaccines are destined for the entire country.
Major cities like Bogotá, Medellin and Cali will begin to vaccinate residents on Thursday.
Veronica Machado, a nurse in the intensive care unit at Sincelejo University Hospital, will be the first Colombian to receive her first inoculation on Wednesday, Duque said.
Colombia’s Covid-19 outbreak is the second-worst in Latin America, according to a tally of confirmed cases by Johns Hopkins University.
To date, 2,198,549 cases and 57,786 deaths have been reported in Colombia, according to Johns Hopkins