Colombia President Extends Covid-19 Emergency Regulations through February 2021: Free Vaccinations Start in 2021

Colombia President Ivan Duque announced last night (November 25) that the current national regulations aiming to limit Covid-19 infections here will continue through at least February 28, 2021.

The regulations include mandatory mask wearing, social distancing and strict health protocols at all businesses, agencies, in public transport and in public spaces.

While citizens must cooperate in efforts to limit infections, “progress has been made in the multilateral environment in the Covax vaccine program and we are also making progress in the bilateral negotiation processes with pharmaceutical companies,” Duque stated in a nationally televised address.

“We have to avoid at all costs severe outbreaks such as those seen in Europe and some places in North America,” he added.

“We will continue to epidemiologically monitor all behavior in our country, following all the indicators and of course making all the necessary prevention decisions and alerting where cases of increases are seen.

“We are also advancing in the development of vaccination programs, since Colombia also participates as a member of the directing council of the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization.,” he added.

Free Vaccinations

Meanwhile, Colombia’s Health Minister Fernando Ruiz added during the same nationally televised program that the first Covid-19 vaccines will become available in Colombia during the first half of 2021.

The initial vaccination campaign would take “three months, initially covering health workers, those over 60 years of age and the population with co-morbidities,” Ruiz stated.

Population groups that are less-likely to suffer mortality from Covid-19 “could have access to the vaccine in 2022,” according to the Minister.

Once the first groups of higher-risk persons are vaccinated, “then the second phase would come, which seeks to generate herd immunity by vaccinating between 50% and 60% of the rest of the population,” according to the Minister.

Colombia doesn’t have any plan to charge anyone — even including higher-income groups (strata five and six) — for vaccinations, he added.

To date, negotiations with pharmaceutical companies have generated commitments to enable initial vaccinations of 15 million people here, he said.

“We have previously signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer and with other companies,” he added. The Ministry also has confidentiality agreements with vaccine developers in China and India, he revealed.

Second-Half 2021 Expansion

Meanwhile, Gina Tambini, Colombia’s official delegate to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), explained that various drug developers world-wide have to date created more than 200 candidate vaccines.

Of those 200, 77 are in early-stage trials, while another 10 are already in “phase three” clinical trials, she said.

Colombia is part of the “Covax” cooperative-development and distribution program, which aims to produce and distribute some 2 billion doses of vaccines world-wide, she noted.

Through that program, “it is expected and projected that in the middle of the year 2021 — between the third and fourth trimesters — vaccines will be available to apply to the [global] population,” she said.

The Covax program already includes a portfolio of nine vaccines, three of which are already in “phase three” trials, including the AstraZeneca laboratory vaccine (University of Oxford); a vaccine from the Moderna laboratory; and another from the Novavax laboratory, she added.