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Minister Alberto Carrasquilla and the general director of Public Budget, Claudia Numa, signed Resolution 2641 of December 15, 2020, which establishes the separation of resources.
The document establishes that, through the Emergency Mitigation Fund (Fome), the Ministry of Finance provided 281,766,288,000 pesos to finance “the acquisition of the vaccine candidate against COVID-19 from the company AstraZeneca”, in collaboration with the University Oxford
The process, the text adds, must take place “under the terms defined by the Coordination and Advisory Body for access to safe and effective vaccines against the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus.”
Hacienda made this decision after the Ministry of Health will request additional resources to purchase vaccines, just after the Comptroller’s Office warned the National Government that it should make a greater budgetary effort for its purchase.
For the control body, the most important thing is that the largest number of the population be vaccinated to save lives and reactivate the economy, as explained by Lina María Aldana, delegate comptroller in Health, to La FM.
The official indicated that the Ministry of Health asked the Treasury for that additional sum to “negotiate ten million vaccines with Astrazeneca and achieve 15 million vaccines by 2021.”
Aldana recalled that the first vaccines are committed to the priority group and it has not been guaranteed for the general population, so “everything depends on the negotiations that are, taking into account that a vaccine has a value between 8 and 12 dollars, which is added to the doses established for each person, which can be up to three ”.
However, according to the known values of the pharmaceutical companies, that of AstraZeneca and Oxford would be, for now, the cheapest on the market, since it is around $ 2.8, because they intend to sell it at the same production cost; although it could have a variation up to 4 dollars. It should be remembered that Pfizer’s is around 12 dollars.
In the last hours, the Government also received criticism from the Attorney General’s Office, which assured that Colombia “was late” to the possibility of starting to vaccinate in the coming weeks.
However, the intention of the Executive would be to have the vaccine in January or February, depending on the goal with which President Iván Duque promised; Although the Minister and Vice Minister of Health have spoken of other months, but all agree that it would be in the first quarter of 2021.
The president said that not only is working with the Covax mechanism, but conversations are under way with several pharmaceutical companies, although a few days ago he admitted that no negotiations have been closed.
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