In
Ecuador, President Guillermo Lasso started his term in office on May 24, 2021 with the promise of vaccinating 9 million Ecuadorians in a hundred days (there were then only 1,4 million Ecuadorians vaccinated). Against all expectations, he managed to deliver on his promise with 9.85 million Ecuadorians having received at least one dose on 23 September (ourworldindata.org numbers) with the Ecuadorian government now planning to start vaccination of children over 5 in mid-October.
Such result was obtained in part thanks to Lasso’s diplomatic ‘pragmatism’ (he follows the same policy in trade area, planning to conclude free trade agreements with the European Union, China, the United States, Japan and South Korea) as the Ecuadorian government has negotiated with a wide range of countries to receive vaccines from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, COVAX and the Chinese Sinovac and CanSino; purchases of Sputnik V vaccines have also been concluded with Russia but the vaccines have still to be delivered. It should be also noted that some eighteen months ago Lasso was distributing freely hydroxychloroquine tablets as a way to fight Covid; he has now changed his mind and is supporting more scientific-based treatments.
This is of course contrasting sharply with the situation under Lenín Moreno when Guayaquil was overwhelmed in April 2020 by the number of Covid-related deaths, when the whole health sector was plagued by corruption scandals, when the president was forced to acknowledge that the vaccination plan only existed in the head of the recently dismissed health minister (well, one of the FIVE health ministers who had succeeded each other between March 2020 and May 2021) and when only a few privileged were able to receive a vaccine dose thanks to money or political connections.
According to the numbers of
El Pais article from 20 September, Ecuador is ranking fourth among American countries with the highest share of fully vaccinated population with 54.6%, behind Uruguay (73.5%), Chile (73.1%) and Canada (69.8%) but just ahead of the United States (54.2%) and El Salvador (50.2%). As pointed out by the article, regional powers actually score pretty mediocre results with Argentina having 45.2% of its population fully vaccinated, Brazil 38.4%, Mexico 32.8% and Colombia 31.5%. Countries with the worst vaccine coverage are the ones ruled by right-wing quasi-mafias (Paraguay: 25.6%, Honduras: 19.8%, Guatemala: 11.6%), Venezuela (14.9%) and, ranking last, Nicaragua (4.2%) where the president and the mentally deranged first lady-vice president clearly don’t care at all (I mean, last year, they even organized ‘Love in the time of Covid-19’ parades and mass gatherings without any social distancing measures as a way to ‘fight’ the pandemic).
From the same article, the ramp-up of the Ecuadorian vaccination program is quite impressive, increasing from only 14.5 doses administered per 100 people on 24 May to 116.4 on 22 September; by comparison, the United States had reached 14.4 doses per 100 people on 12 February but is experiencing a very slow growth in vaccination since June, having administered 115.2 doses per 100 people on 22 September. At this pace, Argentina and Brazil may as well surpass them in the next weeks.
As sum up, quite harshly, by the article:
There is one notable exception: the United States has been vaccinating below its potential for weeks, so that now the gap between where it is and where it is supposed to be, based on income level, is proportionally equivalent to that of much poorer countries such as Honduras, Guatemala or Venezuela. In fact, those countries are currently vaccinating at a higher rate than the US.
The article also elaborates a bit about how wealth remains a key determinant of the vaccination rate both between countries and within countries.
Quite true for Ecuador, where in the area of Guayaquil, the posh canton of Samborondón has a 100% vaccination rate when Guayaquil canton has only only a 53.9% vaccination rate and the lower class canton of Durán a 36.2% vaccination rate (numbers taken from
Primicias). In the area of Quito, the wealthiest Rumiñahui canton has a 82.6% vaccination rate when Quito canton has only a 65.9% vaccination rate. Unsurprisingly, the vaccination rate is particularly low in indigenous-populated cantons in Amazon – 5.9% in Taisha almost entirely settled by Jivaroan communities – (can only be often accessed only by small plane or inland ship hence posing probably a lot of logistics problems), in southern Chimborazo (which is also, probably not entirely incidentally, the area where traditionally record numbers of spoiled ballots are cast in elections) and in San Lorenzo (Esmeraldas), a canton populated by Afro-Ecuadorian rural communities and bordering Colombia.
Nevertheless, cantons with the highest rates of vaccinations also include a few Amazon ones with large indigenous population (Aguarico: 100%; Cuyabeno: 70.6%), the southeast part of El Oro (mestizo rural cantons where economy is dominated by mining and small farming) or the Chota Valley home to sizable Afro-Ecuadorian impoverished communities (92.8% in Mira; 78.7% in Bolívar, Carchi). The Galápagos somehow haven’t yet reached full vaccination despite being having been way ahead of the rest of the country at the start of the vaccination process under Moreno.
