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President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, intends to exchange oil for 2,4 million doses of vaccines in the fight against covid-19
This Sunday, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said that Venezuela is available to exchange part of its oil production for vaccines against covid-19. Maduro's statements come at a time when there is a wave of contagions due to Covid-19 and the Government of Venezuela is finding it difficult to access financial resources frozen abroad.
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During his weekly assessment of the fight against covid-19, Maduro said, “Venezuela has the oil tankers, it has the customers to buy oil and it would dedicate part of its production to guaranteeing all the vaccines it needs”. “Oil for vaccines, we are ready,” insisted Maduro, even though he did not explain his plan in detail, which he said he approved on the same day.
According to the President of Venezuela, through this oil exchange mechanism, the country would have access to 2,4 million doses of the vaccine, equivalent to 20% of Venezuela's needs.
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Maduro does not authorize doses of the PAHO vaccine
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) announced that he had destined doses of the vaccine from the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to the country, which the Government of Maduro did not authorize, for fear of side effects.
Venezuela has registered around 156 cases and more than 1.500 deaths from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused at least 2.777.761 deaths worldwide, resulting from more than 126,6 million cases of infection, according to a balance sheet made by the French agency AFP.
The difficulty of oil production in Venezuela
The Venezuelan oil industry, which was once important in the international market, is experiencing difficulties and its extraction operations have dropped considerably.
The country produced just over 500.00 barrels last February, a small increase from previous months but a far cry from the nearly three million barrels a day in the early 2000s, according to data from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). .
Maduro said that this drop is due to US sanctions against the Venezuelan oil industry, but experts and the opposition say that corruption and mismanagement are the real causes of the drop in production.
Tarek El Aissami, the Venezuelan oil minister, stated in February that he hopes to “reach a production of 1.508.000 barrels of oil per day” by the end of this year, but local experts have declared that this objective will be impossible to achieve.
