‘Path of hope has opened’: Argentina's president thanks Sputnik V developers & Putin for making Covid vaccine deliveries possible

Argentina's President Alberto Fernandez has expressed his gratitude to Russia after a plane from Moscow delivered the first batch of the Sputnik V vaccine against the coronavirus to Buenos Aires earlier on Thursday.

“Argentina now has a vaccine against Covid-19,” Fernandez wrote on Twitter, thanking the developers of Sputnik V and Russian leader Vladimir Putin “for the attitude they have shown toward our country.”

“A path of hope has opened” after the arrival of the Russian vaccine to the country, he said. However, the president pointed out that the pandemic hasn't yet ended and the public must continue to follow all the precautions advised by medics.

The tweet included a video of refrigerated containers with Sputnik V being unloaded at the Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires. The first batch delivered to Argentina consisted of 300,000 doses of the drug.

“Now begins the largest vaccination campaign in our history,” Fernandez, who earlier promised to become the first to get the jab in the country, wrote in a separate message.

According to a deal signed earlier in December, Argentina will be getting 10 million doses of the Russian vaccine overall. On Wednesday, it became the first nation in Latin America to grant approval to Sputnik V. It was done in line with an emergency procedure without local testing.

Argentina has been heavily hit by the pandemic, with over 1.5 million confirmed cases and more than 42,000 deaths due to Covid-19 registered in the country so far.

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