Under the motto ‘Building up a fairer and healthier world’, PAHO said the Covid-19 pandemic showed deep inequities in Latin America and the Caribbean, whose health care systems are fragmented and weakened by previous reforms, something that precluded the region from monitoring and containing the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The challenge now is the equitable access to vaccines, José Moya, representative of PAHO and the World Health Organization (WHO) in Cuba, stressed.

Moya highlighted the Covax mechanism, led by WHO, the Vaccine Alliance and also the Coalition for Epidemic Control that make it possible for the vaccine doses to reach regional countries.

Cuba has the privilege of having five vaccine candidates, two of them in the third phase of clinical trials, and hopefully they will end successfully, and thus they can contain the spread, said Moya in a press conference.

National Director of Epidemiology Dr. Francisco Durán, on the other hand, told Prensa Latina that amid disheartening statistics –over a thousand cases during eight straight days – no child has passed away since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.

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