Scientific American
Reckless Rush to Reopen Threatens Chile’s Exemplary Vaccination Strategy
Easing restrictions without clear risk communication undercuts some of the country’s hard-won progress in fighting the pandemic
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People wait for their turn to be vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19 at the Medalla Milagrosa Church in Valparaíso, Chile, on April 6, 2021. Credit: Javier Torres
COVID-19 vaccine campaigns in Latin America
lag well behind those in the global north. But Chile has been an outlier. It has defied the regional trend and plowed ahead with a campaign that has fully vaccinated a higher percentage of its population than any other country with more than 10 million inhabitants. By the end of March more than one in three Chileans had received a full course of vaccination for COVID-19.