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COVID-19 vaccines were still in the early stages of development last spring, but Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado Quesada was thinking ahead.
Even if those efforts were successful, he figured, wealthy nations alone wouldn’t be able to make enough vaccine to quickly inoculate billions of people.
His solution: a program, launched by the World Health Organization last May that aimed to train dozens of pharmaceutical manufacturers in Latin America, Asia and Africa to increase worldwide production of vaccines once they came on the market.
But the effort, known as the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP, went nowhere.
Vaccine companies and the U S government snubbed WHO initiative to scale up global manufacturing msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Mexico, Chile and Costa Rica have become the first countries in Latin America to start vaccinating their populations against COVID-19, with frontline healthworkers and nursing home residents receiving the first shots.
Mexico, which has one of the world’s highest COVID-19 death tolls, launched its mass vaccination programme at a hospital in the capital, Mexico City, in a televised event on Thursday.
“It’s the best gift I could receive in 2020,” 59-year-old Mexican nurse Maria Irene Ramirez said as she received the injection.
“It makes me safer and gives me more courage to continue in the war against an invisible enemy. We’re afraid but we must continue.”