Vaccinating Venezuela’s 28.5 million people against the coronavirus was always going to be a challenge given low levels of trust and the hollowed-out nature of the country’s public institutions. Bringing visibility to Venezuela’s vaccination debacle has been a pitched battle between the country’s democratically elected political opposition, which demands a credible and efficacious vaccination campaign, and the ruling regime, which has suppressed and obfuscated information on the pandemic.
Data on the country’s vaccination campaign, currently in phase two, indicates a nation unprotected against COVID-19 transmission. Prior to the end of May, fewer than 5 percent of Venezuelans had received a single dose and just 0.5 percent had been fully vaccinated. This brought apocalyptic warnings from Venezuela’s independent National Academy of Medicine that, at those rates, it would take the country 10 years to fully vaccinate the entire population. Fortunately, June and July brought an upward inflection in vaccinations; by mid-July, an estimated 4 million vaccine doses had been administered, with 3.9 percent of the population fully vaccinated and another 6.3 percent partially vaccinated. Still, more than 25 million Venezuelans had not yet received a single dose. Despite this upturn in vaccine administration, Nicolás Maduro’s government lacks a credible, coordinated nationwide vaccination plan. Maduro’s earlier claim that Venezuela would vaccinate 70 percent of its population by the end of August seems dubious. To provide realistic context, both Chile and Uruguay, two of Latin America’s wealthiest and most developed countries, have surpassed the 70 percent threshold, but their vaccine rollouts began in early spring and required about five months to reach this benchmark.
