By NewsDesk  @bactiman63

Costa Rica health officials announced that the first batch of COVID-19 vaccines arrived in the country Wednesday evening.

Image by Koen One Stop Map from Pixabay

The first batch of 9,750 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine arrived in our country this Wednesday at 9:12 pm from Belgium, Officials note.

Because of this, the first Costa Ricans were vaccinated Thursday morning. At 10:30 am, the first dose was applied simultaneously at two points: at the PROPAM long-stay center for the elderly and the CEACO.

“This moment represents for the country the beginning of the path to end the COVID-19 pandemic,” expressed the President of the Republic, Carlos Alvarado, very emotional, highlighting the multiple efforts that the country involved in having this vaccine, a promise that today it was finalized with the application of the vaccine to the first four Costa Ricans.

This vaccination will be sustained throughout 2020 and 2021, but not massively, so that the support of the population as each health area indicates to their communities when it is appropriate to approach to vaccinate, do so in an orderly manner, respecting the order of the five groups to be vaccinated defined by the National Commission for Vaccination and Epidemiology.

The BNT162b2 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech was created through an innovative platform that uses messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA). That is, instead of introducing an antigen into the body (a common method in the development of vaccines), it only introduces the genetic information of the virus through RNA molecules so that our cells can create, by themselves, the proteins that we will defend against SARS-CoV-2.

To date, Costa Rica has reported 162,990 total cases, including 2086 deaths.