Mexico, where up to 12,000 people are infected with the new coronavirus every day and the president continues to believe that the use of masks is not "essential", is now in a battle against time to fulfill the promises of the authorities for vaccination.
After the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, nicknamed AMLO, assured in recent days that it will soon also begin to apply the Chinese CanSino vaccine, although it still does not have the regulatory endorsement, and also announced the signing of an agreement with the Maryland manufacturer Novavax to be
part of its phase 3 studies.
Participating in clinical protocols makes it easier for the country hosting the tests to obtain doses later.
"They did not reach the first vaccines,"
López Obrador acknowledged this Monday after the first vaccination days, which began on Christmas Eve.
"Now it is going to achieve more and they will be arriving," he promised.
According to global comparative data,
1 in 10,000 people in Mexico have been inoculated
so far.
In Israel that figure is already 430 out of every 10,000 people;
in the United States it is 60 people.
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Obtaining enough doses has become an urgent matter, since almost all those that are in the manufacturing process have already been promised to developed countries (Canada, for example, has pre-purchases with which it could vaccinate each inhabitant three times) and because in Mexico, as in the United States
, the pandemic continues to advance relentlessly.
Infections in Mexico, as well as hospitalizations, are at their highest point since COVID-19 cases began to occur in the country at the end of February.
At
least 122,000 people
have already
lost their lives,
according to official data, and even the authorities have had to recognize that there is an underreporting because many Mexicans infected with SARS-CoV2 or with other diseases die at home and on the streets because they are unable to find a hospital in time.
"We don't have beds."
In Mexico, COVID-19 patients die at the doors of hospitals
Dec. 21, 202002: 34
In the last week alone, four states, including the highly populated ones in the metropolitan area of Mexico City, have had to adopt the "red traffic light" of maximum alert when the capacity of hospitals is completely exceeded and because they cannot stop infections.
Vaccine batches smaller than expected
The Mexican authorities assured when presenting their immunization plan that 2.6 million people in Mexico would already be vaccinated by the end of December.
Until this December 28,
around 20,000
health workers
had been injected
with only the first of two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech, the only one that has regulatory permission in Mexico.
For vaccines to serve their purpose, to protect enough people so that infections are greatly reduced, at least 60% of a country's population needs to be injected.
That would equal about 75 million Mexicans.
The first shipment of vials from that pharmaceutical company in mid-December was expected to contain almost half a million vaccines, but the vaccination had to be postponed for a few days as they did not arrive.
With the first batches there have been only 45,000 doses.
In the first days of vaccination there have been huge lines of medical personnel waiting to be vaccinated, although the doses are still not enough for everyone.
Although
Mexico was the first Latin American country
to receive a shipment from Pfizer, it received only about 3,000 initial doses on December 23, in contrast to the 9,750 that Costa Rica received the same day or the 10,000 that arrived in Chile.
Later, 42,000 more vials arrived in Mexican territory.
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The Mexican government will likely have to adjust its original expectations and promises that vaccination of medical personnel would end at the end of January, to begin in February with the protection of other populations, such as those over 60 who are at higher risk of dying if get COVID-19.
In part to that end, Mexico is already participating in phase 3 studies of other potential vaccines.
Among them, China's CanSino –whose clinical studies began in October, although according to López Obrador the vaccine will be applied to the general population as early as January– and the possible vaccine from Janssen, the pharmaceutical branch of the Johnson & Johnson company.
There have also been discussions for Mexico to host tests for the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, which is already being applied in Moscow and was purchased by the Argentine government last week in an attempt to obtain doses.
They ask for distribution with private initiative
One of the great pending issues that still exists in Mexico is: since there are more vaccines,
how is it going to be easier to distribute it to more people?
"The bottleneck is the vaccination process itself," specialist Malaquías López Cervantes told Deutsche Welle.
"People do not understand well where they have to go or when, there is a danger of agglomerations, and after that many lose patience and no one comes to get vaccinated," he added.
The latter is especially problematic because almost all late-stage vaccines, including those from Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca, need people to come back for the second dose.
For now, López Obrador is
entrusting all the storage and distribution only to the armed forces
, but specialists warn that in order to reach more people it would be helpful if the doses could also be applied in pharmacies and other spaces instead of having everything centralized.
In the United States, for example, CVS and Walgreen's are part of the vaccination campaign.
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"At the moment that we are receiving shipments of more than 250,000 weekly doses and we must take them to all corners of the country, we will surely be in trouble" if there are no other mechanisms to distribute, wrote a few days ago the academic on health issues Xavier Tello.
The eagerness to obtain vaccines, which has
been promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and not the Ministry of Health,
marks a contrast with the management that health authorities have had during almost the entire course of the pandemic.
Hugo López-Gatell, Undersecretary of Health who has been the spokesperson and person in charge of the response to the coronavirus, has minimized several times that the death toll would skyrocket to levels much higher than what he said would be “the very catastrophic figure” of 60,000 people.
Until a few weeks ago,
López-Gatell still did not use a mask
(or
mask
, as it is known in Mexico) on a consistent basis because he said it seemed like a "sterile discussion" to recommend its use widely as the CDC and the governments of many countries.
However, the Undersecretary of Health was quick to declare in early December that the first approved vaccine, from Pfizer and BioNTech, was "the hope for Mexico."
López-Gatell is also in charge of the drug regulatory agency Cofepris (which in theory should be independent like the US FDA), so it is in his hands to speed up the approval process for other inoculations.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador entrusted the armed forces with the safeguarding and distribution of the few doses of the COVID-19 vaccine that have reached Mexico until the end of December. Reuters /
As soon as Cofepris gives the go-ahead to others, such as the AstraZeneca and Oxford vaccine that is close to being approved in Europe, it will also be possible for
companies or pharmacies to try to purchase more vaccines on their own to import and apply them.
López Obrador relented on this the weekend after Christmas, in the face of criticism from the political opposition that if the private sector does not participate, enough doses will not be obtained so that Mexico can be relatively close to herd immunity.
"The only thing that is going to be taken care of is that there is no influence," declared López Obrador, indicating that for the
first doses that continue to be distributed to health personnel, politicians or businessmen should not sneak into the line.
He added that "it is a matter of the vaccine being on the world market, because there is still not enough production."
