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The president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, offered this Sunday to exchange part of the oil production of the Caribbean country for anticovid vaccines, in the middle of a new wave of infections and the difficulties of his Government to access millionaire resources frozen abroad.
“Venezuela has the oil tankers, it has the clients to buy the oil from us and it would dedicate a part of its production to guarantee all the vaccines it needs”said the president during the balance that he makes each week of the country’s fight against covid-19.
“Oil for vaccines, we are ready,” he insisted, although he did not offer details of this plan that, he said, approved this same day.
The Venezuelan president also said that persists in his legal claim to unlock funds with which to pay for vaccines, including those of the Covax mechanism.
“It is the first recourse, the diplomatic, political and judicial channels, we have sent letters (…) so that PAHO receives the money from the kidnapped accounts of Venezuela and the vaccines come,” he said.
According to Maduro, through this mechanism the country would access 2.4 million doses, which are equivalent to 20% of Venezuela’s requirements.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) announced days ago that it had allocated doses of the pharmaceutical AstraZeneca for Venezuela, which the Maduro government has not authorized for fear of side effects.
In this sense, Maduro said that he has informed PAHO of the vaccines that the Government authorized and that are in the bank of the Covax mechanism.
Once important in the international market, the Venezuelan oil industry is going through low hours and its pumping operations have dropped considerably from the nearly three million barrels per day it produced in the early 2000s.
According to data from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Venezuela produced just over 500,000 barrels last February, which was a slight increase compared to previous months.
Maduro has said that this collapse is the cause of the United States sanctions against the Venezuelan oil industry, but experts and opponents indicate that mismanagement and corruption they are the real causes of the drop in production.
Last February, the Minister of Petroleum of Venezuela, Tarek El Aissami, said that it aims to “reach a production of 1,508,000 barrels per day of oil” by the end of 2021, but local specialists have declared that this goal will be impossible to meet.
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