In Peru, Dr. Ramiro Lazo Camposano, a pediatrician, was going door-to-door seeing his patients in the capital city of Lima at a time when most health care workers in the U.S. had already celebrated getting their second shots of the COVID vaccine. But he was not vaccinated. Doses were in short supply across Peru.
Eventually, Lazo Camposano, 74, caught the virus and passed it onto his son.
“Both went to the ICU unit, and they didn’t make it,” says his daughter Dr. Marcela Lazo Escalante, a physician and medical researcher in Lima. Father and son died in February.
The tragedy of these dual deaths underscores a problem in many countries. Vaccines are showing up late — and there simply aren’t enough doses of vaccine yet to make a dent in the pandemic.
That’s not the only challenge. Even as millions of donated doses make their way into Africa, Asia and Latin America’s lower-resource countries through the global vaccine-sharing program COVAX, they may not have the means to give out shots to citizens on a massive scale.