An employee stands next to the first shipment of AstraZeneca's covid-19 vaccine delivered under the Covax scheme, at the Benito Juárez international airport in Mexico City on April 22, 2021. HENRY ROMERO (Reuters)
The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, announced this Monday that his Government will denounce the Global Access Fund for Vaccines against covid-19 (Covax, for its acronym in English), promoted by the United Nations Organization, for not having distributed the agreed doses in the country.
“We are going to file a complaint because they have not given us vaccines from the organization that was created in the UN, Covax.
They owe us $75 million.
It is already a lot, it is the last straw”, declared the president in his morning press conference.
This newspaper has tried unsuccessfully to contact the representatives of the United Nations in Mexico, through the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), as well as the Covax mechanism, to find out their position regarding the statements of the Mexican president, but until They have not responded to interview requests so far.
For his part, after being questioned about the reasons for the complaint, López Obrador did not want to give more details and only said that it will be presented as soon as possible.
On the other hand, the president has accused acts of corruption in high international organizations that affect the poorest countries.
“Imagine, giving them money in advance for the vaccines, it will be a year now and we have been looking for an agreement, being tolerant because it is an international organization, but we are not cover-ups,” he warned.
“Furthermore, a renovation is also needed in these organizations”, he mentioned.
Mexico has only received about 4.3 million vaccines against covid, of the more than 50 million it bought in advance last year, after promoting and subscribing to the Covax mechanism in October 2020, as reported by the Government of López Obrador.
Last February, the president announced that the country would receive about 18 million vaccines, but in April some 15 million doses were still pending, so López Obrador said that he would seek to have them exchanged for vaccines for children.
However, in June of this year, the Ministry of Health must report the number of vaccines received and applied through Covax.
According to information from PAHO, 24.6 million doses of vaccines against covid-19 have been delivered in Mexico through this mechanism.
The records of doses delivered by the international organization contrast with the reports of the Mexican Government and coincide with the latest Covax report in which it admitted that until January of this year a billion vaccines had been distributed throughout the world, half of its objective.
Furthermore, in September 2021, the fund admitted that it would only deliver 1.4 billion of the 2 billion doses it had promised in 2021 to developing countries.
Since the start of the pandemic, Mexico has accumulated 6.9 million infections and more than 329,000 deaths from coronavirus.
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