Mexico deploys the largest shipment of vaccines to take the drug to the entire country

Military unload the DHL plane that brought more than 400,000 doses to Mexico .----- / EFE

The largest shipment of vaccines has landed this Tuesday in Mexico.

More than 439,700 doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech drug have been received by the authorities at the capital airport.

The challenge now is to set up a clockwork machinery to move this fifth shipment along eight routes.

The goal is to place these hundreds of thousands of doses in 25 states of the country in the next few hours.

The country is playing in this distribution strategy the ability to demonstrate efficiency in the large-scale application of immunizations, which will no longer increase in the coming weeks.

“Today will be the whole movement to the different States and from States to covid hospitals.

Vaccination will begin tomorrow ”, announced the Secretary of Defense, Luis Cresencio Sandoval, who coordinates distribution efforts.

With today's shipment, Mexico exceeds half a million vaccines received since December 23.

The authorities of the Ministry of Health have reported this Tuesday that 81% of the slightly more than 100,000 injections received in the first four shipments have been used.

Yesterday just over 5,000 people were immunized.

These have been administered to health personnel in the center of the country and in two entities in the north.

Today's shipment aims to cover the rest of the States.

Mexico lags behind among the countries that have applied the most vaccines per 100,000 inhabitants.

At the moment, it has only administered 0.07, according to the Our World in Data count, which presents a lag with respect to the figures presented by the Mexican Government.

The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador remains optimistic that it will receive 1.4 million doses in January.

These calculations will allow the Administration to meet the goals that it has proposed and which are led by the protection of more than one million employees of the Health sector, the one that has left the most victims in the world.

In February and March, it will be the turn of the elderly, who will be punctured in 10,000 vaccination sites.

López Obrador has said that he will receive one of the eight million doses that they have bought from the Chinese laboratory CanSinoBio.

"It would be then when the elderly in large cities are vaccinated ... at the end of February it would be my turn to get vaccinated," said the president in his morning conference.

The authorities also contemplate the use of 24 million doses of the Russian Sputnik vaccine for the elderly population distributed in rural communities and difficult to access.

The operation that will be deployed this Tuesday throughout the country will be the first test for the plan designed by Salud.

The Army began at 1:20 p.m. to distribute the doses by various land routes to the neighboring states of Mexico City: the State of Mexico, Hidalgo, Morelos, Puebla, Querétaro and Tlaxcala.

In the capital, the distribution must reach the 69 hospitals that fight the virus.

More complex is the operation of eight air routes that will carry vaccines to 25 states.

This will begin with the departure of seven aircraft from Mexico City to the States of Sonora, Chihuahua, Yucatán, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Oaxaca and Tamaulipas.

From there another 38 aircraft will be used to reach 17 locations.

Another military helicopter will take off from Mexico City to Guerrero to distribute doses at three points in the state.

The soldiers' calculations estimate that the last plane will be landing at 11:30 p.m. in Tepic, Nayarit.

The last package will be delivered at 03:40 on January 13 in Campeche, in the south of the country.

All shipments will be escorted by the military during transfers to Army, Air Force and Navy bases and from there to the health centers where they will be used.

The operation aims to provide immunizations to 879 hospitals.

The government has created a 12-person team called the Road Runner Brigade to administer the vaccines.

There will be one for each center where the medication is administered.

They are made up of a doctor and a nurse, four soldiers, two or three promoters from the Ministry of Welfare known as servants of the nation (one may be a member of the Sembrando vida tree planting program), one more representative of Education or of the programs The school is ours or the Benito Juárez Scholarships and two volunteers.

The wide presence of government officials ignites the opposition's accusations of the political use that the Administration intends to give the vaccine in an electoral year where the Chamber of Deputies will be renewed and 15 governors will be elected.

Mexico will not make the amount of the contracts transparent

The Mexican Foreign Minister, Marcelo Ebrard, said this Tuesday that the Government cannot make transparent the amount of the contracts it has signed with various companies for the purchase of millions of doses of the vaccines. Hours before, President López Obrador asked to make the agreements signed with international laboratories transparent, after the newspaper 'Reforma' published that Foreign Relations had reserved the information for five years. "There is nothing to hide here, we have been one of the countries that has made more public information available," added Ebrard in the capital's hangar. The secretary reported that the country is obliged to respect drug pre-purchase contracts. When they are in force, they will be released, informed the chancellor.