[ad_1]
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Tuesday criticized the “optimism” of the international press about Pfizer’s new vaccine against covid-19, accusing it of silencing advances in vaccines in Russia and China.
“I am happy that there are vaccines in the West, we hope it is true, and that it is not a geopolitical maneuver,” he said.
The president of Venezuela spoke in the presidential palace of Miraflores, in Caracas, during a meeting with members of his cabinet, broadcast on Venezuelan state television.
“I do not have the studies of the Pfizer vaccine in my hands. I already ordered them and now I will read them. They say it is 90% effective (…), I ask what happens with the other 10% ineffectiveness ”, he asked.
Nicolas Maduro recommended to the press that, in relation to vaccines in Russia, China, India and Cuba, “evaluate and report on the [mesmo] optimism [e] the same magnitude, because it gets suspicious, it seems like a geopolitical campaign “.
“Russia has a super advanced vaccine and China has several, and when they report from Russia and when they announce that they are ready and 100% effective, there is silence in the Western press,” he accused.
According to Nicolás Maduro, the informative agenda “of the large television media of the United States of Europe” about the Pfizer vaccine made the stock markets and even oil “rise”.
Maduro plans vaccination against covid-19 in Venezuela starting in April
On the other hand, he guaranteed that in Venezuela the tests of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine are going “very well”, specifying that the Venezuelan government is waiting to release the final results.
“Objectively evaluating the world panorama, I estimate that by April 2021 we will be able to start the process of safe, free and quality vaccination to combat covid-19”, he is stressed.
The president of Venezuela also affirmed that the Executive works to strengthen the Venezuelan public health system, highlighting in particular the sanitary and epidemiological effort made during the covid-19 pandemic.
Venezuela received, last October, a batch of 2,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, to participate in phase 3 trials of that drug.
The country has registered 95,149 cases of patients with the new coranavirus since the beginning of the pandemic, in addition to 830 deaths, with 90,059 people recovering from the disease.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 1,263,890 deaths in more than 50.9 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report by the French agency AFP.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
