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A town in Chiapas refuses to be vaccinated against the coronavirus

2021-02-08T23:10:19.510Z


Authorities of San Juan Cancuc have notified the Ministry of Health that they will not allow its 38,000 inhabitants to be vaccinated


Inhabitants of San Juan Cancuc, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, on February 6.ISAAC GUZMAN / AFP

An indigenous town in Mexico has rebelled against vaccines to cope with the covid-19 pandemic.

The authorities of San Juan Cancuc, located in the mountains of the State of Chiapas, have reported through an official document that the 45 communities that make up the municipality will not allow the population to be vaccinated against covid-19, despite that Mexico continues to break records of infections due to the new coronavirus.

José López López, municipal president of San Juan Cancuc, reported on February 1, through an official letter to the health authorities, that in a meeting held on January 28 with representatives of the communities that make up his town, they discussed the “ adverse effects ”of the vaccines on the population, so they decided“ in a majority ”way that“ no ”vaccination campaign will be carried out in the town, neither for the elderly nor for another inhabitant of San Juan.

The document records, however, that two people opposed the controversial decision and expressed their willingness to be vaccinated.

The letter was sent to Octavio Coutiño, head of the Health district of the San Cristóbal de las Casas region.

Local authorities allege that the pandemic has not affected their communities, belonging to the Mayan Tzeltal ethnic group, and therefore has not caused the alarms that it does generate in the rest of the country, with more than 166,000 deaths from covid and almost two million infected.

These villages are governed by a form of autonomous government, in which decisions are made from meetings with the inhabitants and based on their indigenous beliefs and customs.

Chiapas is one of the most lagging states in Mexico.

76% of its population is in a situation of poverty and more than 30% in extreme poverty, according to 2018 data from the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval).

Only 5% of its inhabitants are considered non-poor.

In several municipalities, its inhabitants have rejected the strategies that the health authorities have taken to deal with the covid.

In the Venustiano Carranza municipality, according to local authorities, 20 people died every day in July.

The municipal government tried to adopt measures such as the closure of businesses, but the angry residents prevented it and as a measure of protest they burned the mayor's office.

Other officials from San Juan Cancuc reacted to the decision made by the leaders of the municipality against the vaccination campaign and said that it is the result of the lack of information on the importance of vaccines, although the federal government has emphasized the urgency get vaccinated when doses are ready.

"The information is bad (...) because (they make them believe that) vaccines bring diseases" and that if they inject them "something will happen to them," said Marcelino García, director of Civil Protection of the municipality, to

France Presse

.

The Government of Mexico has announced an ambitious commitment to vaccines.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador - who resumed his morning press conference on Monday after being infected with covid - reported this Monday that this week one million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the University of Oxford will arrive in the country, out of a total of 77 million vaccines that have been negotiated with the pharmaceutical company.

Mexico has also closed contracts to acquire 35 million doses of Chinese CanSino, 24 million of Russian Sputnik V and more than 34.4 million of Pfizer, the first vaccine that began to be applied to medical personnel, but whose second dose continues pending due to supply problems.

The Government has also set up an Internet site so that older adults can register to access the vaccination campaign, although the site collapsed in the first hours due to the high demand for registration, according to the Undersecretary of Health, Hugo López- Gatell, in charge of the government response to the emergency caused by the pandemic.

This system has been criticized by organizations such as Amnesty International, which on Friday denounced that it excludes "a large part of the population" that does not have the Unique Population Registration Code (CURP), a requirement requested during the registration process in the website.

Other organizations have also denounced the exclusion of broad sectors of the population that in Mexico do not have Internet access, as is the case in the indigenous regions of Chiapas.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-02-08

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