translated from Spanish: Mañalich and Piñera’s sayings about achieving herd immunity in June: “You’re wrong”

Former Health Minister Jaime Mañalich was part of CNN Chile’s “Zero Tolerance” program, where he addressed the current pandemic scenario and set out Chile to achieve herd immunity in June, as President Sebastián Piñera has said as part of the vaccination campaign. You’re wrong. I would tell him that talking today, with the variants that are appearing, about a herd immunity target in which life is going to be normal again, it’s not possible,” he said. “I said that in September we were going to have a safety immunity. We have so many people immunized, that the current rate of reproduction of the virus is -1 (…) This requires transnational collective immunity,” he replied. On the new variants and the focus that has been put on Brazil, Mañalich noted that the airport should have been closed in advance. “I think it’s complex to judge with data that you have in the after (…) Brazil formally said that it had a problem in Manaus around the end of January, so action began to be taken in different countries, would it have been wise to close the airport for Brazil earlier? I think so,” he emphasized. On the reasons for the rise in contagion, Mañalich stated that “we had a second wave, for me, unexpected during the summer and attributed it to relaxation for exhaustion, due to bad signs, no good explained the risk, anything. And on that second wave has been mounted an overola that is the arrival of the Brazilian variant”. In this line, he closed by ensuring that “we are not because of Minister Paris, we are so because of the enemy that is the virus.”

Original source in Spanish