97% of the Venezuelan Education Staff Got COVID-19 Vaccines

On Sunday, Venezuela's Education Minister Yelitze Santaella announced that 97 percent of educational personnel have already been vaccinated against COVID-19.

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"President Nicolas Maduro's administration has managed to vaccinate 97 percent of the administrative staff, workers, cooks, and teachers," she said during an interview offered to Culture Minister Ernesto Villegas on his television program.

Over 700,000 adolescents between 12 and 17 years old have also been vaccinated and authorities are working intensively on the vaccination of children between 2 and 11 years of age. Given that the schools are on vacation, the Minister called on parents to get their children vaccinated at the different points authorized by the Health Ministry.

Thanks to the advances in the control of the pandemic, Venezuelan educational institutions were able to comply with the "first phase" of the safe and progressive return to face-to-face classes.

"It was not easy asking our educators to have face-to-face classes. It really was a challenge and President Maduro took it up," Santaella said, adding that classes were suspended for 19 months from March 2020 to October 2021.

The Bolivarian authorities took advantage of this period to implement "My Beautiful School", a plan aimed at repairing and modernizing the educational infrastructure in a country where there are some 29,000 educational institutions, 4,000 of which are private institutions.

"We have recovered over 5,000 educational facilities", Santaella said and emphasized that the Bolivarian government continues to guarantee the right to education despite the U.S.-led economic harassment against her country.