Doctors from private hospitals protest to request the vaccine, this Friday in Mexico City.Mario Guzmán / EFE
I am 44 years old and I still do not know when I will receive my doses of the covid-19 vaccine.
In Mexico we are at the stage of the calendar in which it is the turn of those in their sixties and over, and the formidable category of those in their fifties is still ahead in line.
And that, not to mention the presidential decision that teachers are treated just after the elderly and even before private sector doctors (despite the latter being at greater risk of contagion, in a ratio of seven to one, per above any other profession, according to a study in the British Medical Journal).
But science cannot do much together with the president's desire that the members of the powerful union of educators reciprocate by voting for the official party.
Anyway: I know that my personal anxiety is not extraordinary.
I am afraid that I share the anxiety that indeterminate waiting puts in the body with tens of millions of Mexicans.
Because we all know that the vaccine can be one of the doors that open towards the solution of the pandemic crisis, under which we have been crushed for more than a year, but we have no idea when we will be able to access it.
And in the meantime, you have to remain isolated, take care of yourself as much as possible, keep your spirits up, avoid the neighbor orate who does not wear a mask or takes it off in the street to sneeze ...
No one who is not deluded could assume that mass vaccination was going to be a simple process, but perhaps no one, either, even thought about the possibility that it would develop in such a tense and rugged way.
Because, of course, as this is still Mexico, and we Mexicans are champions of anti-civic behavior, there have been all kinds of incidents in our vaccination centers.
Forget crowds and disagreements, which were more or less predictable circumstances and that, well or badly, have been faced on the fly.
No. The scope of our nonsense has been greater than the logistical difficulties and the disaster that has been, until now, the supply of vaccines (the latter is another issue, with its own sinister nuances).
Let's just review the anecdotal of the points of attention.
There have already been documented complaints that some assistants and doctors played a duck and did not inject the patients they should, it is not known if by "mistake" or to keep a dose up their sleeve (although government enthusiasts argued that it was all about " CIA-style montages, ”the medical authorities chose to apologize).
They have already arrested a couple of boys, with pretense of influencers, who disguised themselves to pose as over 60 years to see if they were vaccinated before time.
There was already a very militant nurse (and with less professional ethics than an enraged mongoose) who refused to inject a woman because she considered her too bourgeois, since the vaccine "is only for the people."
And there have already been, in different cities and states, all kinds of cases of recommended and palomeados by the power that skipped those who waited in VIP plan ... And one, in his waiting position in this line in which there are millions ahead and millions more still further from the goal, he can't help but take a deep breath.
Wait, the president asks us, while his government speculates on vaccines.
And there will be no choice but to do so.
But someone will have to articulate all this, one day, and make it clear that our history with covid-19 was full of truculence, pettiness, delusions and negligence.
The half a million deaths that we carry, including the victims included in the accounts of overmortality, are the devastating proof of this.
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