Mexico approves Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, takes lead in Latin America

The Mexican government on Saturday approved the vaccine from the American laboratory Pfizer, which should begin to be applied in the coming days to health workers in this country, thus leading to mass vaccination against the coronavirus in Latin America.

The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador had already announced this week its intention to start vaccination at the end of December, with a first batch of 250,000 doses to vaccinate 125,000 people between this month and January 2021. But it needed health approval.

It is now the fifth country in the world to allow the use of the Pfizer vaccine, behind Great Britain, Canada, Bahrain and the United States which approved it around the same time.

Mexico, with 128 million people, adds 1.2 million cases of covid-19 and 113,019 deaths. While the United States adds more than 15 million cases and 295,000 deaths.

The vaccines are expected to start arriving in Mexico next week. Under Secretary of Health Hugo López-Gatell said the approval “is certainly a source of hope”, although the first rounds of injections are far from sufficient for coronavirus cases in the country.

“We are in an emergency situation,” said the head of government of Mexico City, which was still the main epicenter of the crisis in that country, as he recorded a declining “plateau” after the first. “peak” of last June.

Hospitals in the capital were at 78% capacity on Friday, a level that worries officials.

Launch of Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum an urgent and almost desperate appeal to the whole population to stay at home, always wear chin straps and not organize meetings or parties because the country’s capital is a week away from saturation of its hospitals and COVID-19 infections continue to increase.

Race for vaccine in Latin America

Globally, more than 1.59 million lives have been lost to covid-19 since it emerged in China a year ago. In Latin America, one of the regions worst affected by the pandemic, with more than 466,000 dead, the race to obtain the vaccine has endured the obstacles characteristic of the inequality of the region.

Countries like Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Argentina have been able to make private deals with the labs that make the vaccine and hope to start distributing the first doses between late December and early next year.

But others have no choice but to place their hopes on the Global Access Fund for COVID-19 vaccines.

Known as COVAX, this plan, promoted in part by the World Health Organization (WHO), aims to “accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines and ensure fair and equitable access to them. for everyone. country of the world”.

The immunization schedules of each country are obviously conditioned by how their access to the vaccine will be. Apart from Mexico, which officially announced its plan, they know each other some concrete details of how other nations in the region will implement this process.

The UK this week became the first Western country to start applying the Pfizer vaccine.

While in Moscow, the British laboratory AstraZeneca and Russia announced clinical trials combining their two vaccines (Russian is Sputnik V) against the coronavirus, to achieve a “better immune response”.

In addition, Russia and China have already launched vaccination campaigns with vaccines produced in the country that have not yet been finalized.

And Europe is awaiting vaccine decisions from Pfizer and Moderna in late December and early January, respectively.

Source: AFP, ANSA and AP