Third COVID-19 dose and its effectiveness

Published in El Pais, 19 October 2021.

Many countries are already administering the third dose of COVID-19 to the vulnerable population. Other countries are making purchases of more COVID-19 vaccines. This is the ideal time to stop and think about how to decide which vaccine ought to be bought.

Is it worth buying the cheapest? Is it better to buy back from a befriended country? I think the first thing that needs to be put in the balance is the expense of having to prolong the quarantine measures against the spread of COVID-19 and also see the effectiveness of the vaccines that in the end are the reason why many countries have opened up to a new normal.

Bolivia is a poor country, but should it wait for donations? Nonsense. The dependence makes us vulnerable, and we have already seen it in the case of the Sputnik and the AstraZeneca vaccine since, waiting for another batch of donations, many citizens have not been able to access their second dose at the right time. In addition, quarantine measures have pushed at least 20 million into poverty across the Latin American region by 2020. New calculations on this subject will surely be seen at the end of 2021 but it can already be felt that poverty has also grown this year.

In terms of cost-effectiveness, purchases of Sinopharm and others that are 60% or less effective put at risk “going back to normal” because it is like having half the population protected and the other not. It doesn’t work. We must have the population protected in order to reactivate the economy. And the population does not want any vaccine, they want vaccines that guarantee high protection. Therefore, the saying “cheap costs expensive” is still valid. First, the population does not want to be vaccinated with “any vaccine that protects 60% or less.” Second, vaccines that are 90% or more effective in the end are cheaper because they allow the economy to be reactivated without putting the population at risk.