Mexico expects the arrival of the first 200,000 doses of the Russian vaccine next week, the government said on Tuesday.
The acquisition of the drug from Russia has become a priority issue for the country, which seeks to diversify its options in the face of the global shortage of vaccines and which is going through the most delicate moment since the start of the pandemic, already exceeding 150,000 deaths from covid- 19, according to the latest official data.
"[The arrival of vaccines] opens a new hope," said this Tuesday Juan Antonio Ferrer, director of the Institute of Health for Well-being, the commitment of this Administration to provide health coverage to the 33 million Mexicans who have no security Social.
Sputnik V requires two applications, so this first shipment is expected to benefit 100,000 people.
Ferrer has not specified what day the shipment will be received because the security protocols for the transfer are still being defined and contracts are being negotiated that, according to the official, will be finalized "in the next few hours."
The government announced on Monday that it had agreed to purchase 24 million doses of the vaccine, after Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, held a phone call.
As early as last week, the Government announced that it expected to receive between January 25 and 29, 400,000 doses of Sputnik V, a calculation that cannot be met due to logistical difficulties.
"What is desirable and apparently possible is that we begin to have the vaccine immediately, ending the month of January," said Hugo López Gatell, the spokesman for the pandemic, in the latest daily report on the virus.
López-Gatell traveled to Argentina at the beginning of the year, where Sputnik V is already being administered, to advance negotiations with a delegation from the Kremlin, given the doubts that the Mexican health authorities themselves had due to the lack of information from Sputnik V published in the west.
The drop in the production of the Pfizer prototype and the arrival until the end of next March of the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca, already approved in Mexico, forced the Government to look for other alternatives to continue with its vaccination campaign.
The steps to acquire and approve the Russian vaccine have accelerated in recent weeks, but have not materialized, the Ministry of Health has confirmed to this newspaper.
The Mexican president, who announced last weekend that he had been infected with covid-19, is recovering little by little from the disease and continues to attend to priority issues while he is at rest in the National Palace.
"He has been in confinement, he is strong," said Olga Sánchez Cordero, the Secretary of the Interior (Interior).
Sánchez Cordero has added that the president's health is "sensitive data" and that information will be reserved to respect his privacy.
The contagion of López Obrador and the magnate Carlos Slim is for many a reflection of the complicated situation that the country is going through, the fourth with the most deaths in absolute terms in the world.
The worst moment of the epidemic has come after the Christmas festivities and at a point in which the flow of laboratory vaccines in the West has presented unforeseen events.
CanSino's Chinese vaccine, which has been conducting clinical trials in the country since November, is also expected to be approved in the coming days.
In the case of Sputnik V, the approval will be based on the file that the Argentine health authorities had already reviewed and will include information on the latest phase of clinical trials of the Russian vaccine, which is still pending publication in an international scientific journal.
The Russian vaccine reports 91% effectiveness and more than 50 countries have contacted Moscow to access it, at least a dozen have already authorized its use.
The controversy that has surrounded Sputnik V is that its research protocol had not been made public, in addition to criticism that it had been tested on very few volunteers before it began to be distributed.
The decision of the Mexican health authorities is that the need to obtain the vaccine must be the priority criterion, above doubts.
Other Latin American countries have opted for a similar decision, the Kremlin has purchase intention agreements with countries such as Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil.
Pending the third approval of a drug to prevent coronavirus, the country expects to administer at least four vaccines in the first quarter of 2021: Pfizer, Sputnik V, CanSino and AstraZeneca.
The goal is to immunize more than 14 million Mexicans between January and March, with the expectation that the vaccination process will accelerate from the middle of next month.