The President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, received this Saturday the first dose of the vaccine Sputnik V, along with his wife, Cilia Flores, reported state television.

“I’m vaccinated, I don’t feel any kind of ‘skalosky’, or ‘fiebrasky’,” Maduro joked. “They say you go out speaking Russian,” said the 58-year-old president with a laugh.

Citing studies spread around the world, Maduro, who has one of his main allies in Russia, along with China, Cuba and Turkey, stressed that Sputnik V “is a vaccine with great power to generate immunity.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” his wife commented. “Cilia is braver than me, it did hurt me,” said Maduro.

On February 18, Venezuela began to supply the first dose of the Russian vaccine against covid-19 Sputnik V to the country’s health personnel, after receiving 100,000 doses of the 10 million it ordered.

On Monday, March 1, 500,000 doses of the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinopharm arrived in the Caribbean country. The president announced the day before that its application will begin on Monday.

“On Monday next week the vaccination with the Chinese vaccine begins, so we would be vaccinating with the Russian Sputnik vaccine and with the Chinese vaccine,” he said on Friday during an event to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the death of his mentor, former President Hugo Chávez.

Venezuela also has between 1.4 and 2.4 million AstraZeneca vaccines reserved through the Covax system of the World Health Organization (WHO). However, they have not been able to arrive due to debts with the WHO.

The Maduro administration has seen its access to foreign state accounts limited, with blocked funds whose control rests with the opposition leader Juan Guaidó, recognized as president of the South American country by the United States and fifty governments.

With 30 million inhabitants, Venezuela had as of Friday 140,960 cases and 1,364 deaths from covid-19, according to official figures.

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