Mexico becomes the first country in Latin America to approve the Pfizer vaccine

A nurse shows a dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine on the first day of mass immunization in the UK.POOL / Reuters

The Government of Mexico announced this Friday that it will approve the use of the Pzifer vaccine to immunize the country.

The forecasts of the Undersecretary of Health, Hugo López-Gatell, suggest that the immunization plan will begin with the help of the Army in five days with the first 250,000 vials that arrive in the country.

With the approval of the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risks (Cofepris), 2.6 million Mexicans can be vaccinated before the end of December, according to the authorities' forecasts.

Mexico thus becomes the first country in Latin America to approve the drug and will also be the one to initiate mass immunization in the region.

The Undersecretary of Health has met with experts from Cofepris to approve the recommendation of the Pfizer vaccine, in an exercise similar to that of the FDA.

Although this institution is binding only for the United States, López-Gatell has indicated that, being an international benchmark, Mexico has followed up on the agency's work to be prepared in the event of the vaccine's approval.

"There are collaboration agreements and based on this we will have our expedited reflection process for sanitary authorization," he said last Tuesday.

"If everything goes as planned and as we have been talking with Pfizer, we will have the vaccines in the penultimate or last days of the third week of December," López-Gatell announced at a press conference before adding that the doses will begin to be used as soon as they arrive.

The first round of vaccination will last until February and the logistics for the distribution of the product will be in charge of the Armed Forces.

The authorities have not detailed how they will solve the requirements of an expensive freezing system that the vials need to be preserved, but they have indicated that they will have the support of the pharmaceutical company and the Army.

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has already announced that the vaccine would be universal, free and easily accessible to the population.

"There was talk of applying it first in Mexico City and Coahuila, but it could be extended to two or three (more states) to get there," he reported at a press conference.

The president has ensured that health personnel will be the first to be immunized for being on the front line of battle against the disease, with Mexico being the country with the highest mortality among doctors and nurses from coronavirus in the world.

López Obrador has suggested to the companies that they take charge of vaccinating their workers as "a solidarity contribution", but he has insisted that the responsibility to guarantee the right to health lies with the Mexican State.

The American pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced that its vaccine is 95% effective in all ages, genders and races of the trial participants, largely conducted in that country.

The vaccine, developed in collaboration with the German BioNTech, has been well tolerated by the participants and the only serious adverse effects recorded have been fatigue, in 3.8% of cases, and headache, in 2% .

Based on RNA technology - it takes a genetic code from the virus to activate the human immune system - this vaccine requires two applications that must be given 21 days apart and must be stored at 70 degrees below zero.

In total, Mexico has allocated 20,000 million pesos (about 1,000 million dollars) and has contracted more than 34 million doses of the drug from Pfizer.

This vaccine costs five times more than the prototype that the Government had opted for, the one developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford.

The Mexican authorities have said that there are confidentiality clauses that prevent giving details of the agreement signed with Pfizer, although the price set by the pharmaceutical company is around 40 dollars per immunized patient, that is, after receiving two doses.

At the moment, the vaccine is being used to immunize the population of the United Kingdom, the first country in the world to approve it.

Thousands of people over 80 years of age and healthcare personnel have injected the first dose normally and without serious incident.

However, the British drug regulatory authority sent a warning note to hospitals on Wednesday not to supply patients with a relevant history of allergic reactions to other vaccines.

Two members of the British medical staff suffered anaphylactoid reactions after receiving injections on Tuesday.