“Host a celebration of its supposed successes”: Bloomberg’s scathing criticism of AMLO and the handling of the pandemic in Mexico

This Saturday, the American magazine Bloomberg Businessweek published an article which spoke about the mismanagement of the pandemic in Mexico, vaccines and the speech of the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), which manages that there was no major problem with the situation.

The text titled “How to forget a pandemic”, begins by talking about the mornings of President López Obrador. “Every morning, Monday through Friday, the President of Mexico hosts a televised celebration of his so-called successes”says the text.

Recall that until January, during the morning press conference, there was a giant population chart, in which it was emphasized that the undoubted progress of the country, which was described as the first Latin American country to vaccinate its citizens against the COVID-19 virus.

After that, we read, the data turned bad again, as Pfizer, which at the time was the sole vaccine supplier, halve deliveries, then completely. For this reason, deaths in Mexico have increased.

This, we read, the Mexican population did not know, carried away by the positive speech of President López Obrador, but the country was becoming a hotbed of the global pandemic.

The government’s alternate version of reality included an undercount of cases and deaths, something it acknowledged late in March when it announced that Covid-related deaths were much higher than the official tally, which is was between 234,000 and July 5. derive from excess mortality, an epidemiological term designating increased mortality compared to an average year. In one of these analyzes, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington places the deaths due to Covid in Mexico at about 540,000 ″, indicates the text.

Keep in mind that during the morning press conference on January 18, AMLO released false and uncomfortable data. For these dates, Pfizer He had just shipped to Mexico down the line for limited supplies, while shutting down a factory for improvements.

President López Obrador told his audience that he was accepting a request for altruism, which never existed, from the The United Nations, which consisted of abandoning vaccines so that the pharmaceutical company Pfizer could increase its production to supply the poorest countries that could not afford it.

López Obrador, on this occasion, affirmed that he had granted the said request, it would have been unfair, inhuman and contradictory not to do so.

What was really going on was completely out of the hands of the country and its government. While the pharmaceutical company was carrying out renovations at its factory in Belgium, the same company had made the decision to reduce shipments of vaccines to Latin America and Europe, to increase shipments to Israel, since the latter had just signed a data exchange agreement with Pfizer, to send vaccines to the country to test their effectiveness.

The methods for calculating the number of deaths in the world vary, but each study shows that Mexico is one of the most affected countries in this area, globally. PFor the monthly average of excess deaths during the pandemic, Mexico ranks third, behind Ecuador and Peru, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

During the month of December, the sharp increase in deaths in Mexico from the virus was quite noticeable. It was not until May that hospitalizations in the country fell by 13% of hospital capacity, When in January, it was 90%, when the positivity rate that was once the highest in the world, around 50%, fell to 17%.

The article also explains that AMLO did not take much of the action that other countries did. “As Europe publicly fights on how to reopen to foreign tourism, Mexico has never closed air travel from any country or demanded testing or quarantines from visitors. But forgetting does not mean that it did not happen or that it cannot happen again soon ”.

U.S. media say Mexico’s first and possibly biggest mistake was its COVID testing plan. As part of Mexico’s response to the pandemic, only people with symptoms were tested.

The country’s second big mistake was AMLO’s refusal to go into debt to pay for the fiscal stimulus or aid to the poor. something that the leaders of most of the major economies have done.

“It reflected the economic idiosyncrasies of the president himself, who has never had a credit card in his name. The son of fabric store owners in the state of Tabasco, AMLO shunned luxury and refused to fly the presidential Boeing 787 Dreamliner he has been trying to sell since his first day in power. Its political philosophy was shaped by the disastrous default of 1982, which drove inflation to 115%, and the tequila crisis of 1994, which produced a sudden devaluation of the peso and a recession, ”he said. newspaper text.

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