North Miami Beach mayor offers free vaccination to international tourists traveling to his city

After months of controversy over “COVID tourism”, the situation appears to have changed in the United States, where the vaccination rate is successful, with more than 235 million vaccines administered nationwide. Now, North Miami Beach Mayor Anthony F. DeFillipo has urged international tourists to travel to South Florida to receive the popular injection.

The message is specially dedicated to Latin Americans who suffer from delayed vaccination campaigns in their countries where, in the vast majority of them, even health workers are not fully vaccinated. Far from this gloomy panorama is the USA, where any adult who wants it is already vaccinated and, according to the predictions of Bill Gates himself, in four months they will have a marked excess of doses.

As detailed Univision, DeFillipo revealed that he has already contacted consulates in Peru, Colombia and Honduras to inform their citizens that they can be vaccinated in North Miami Beach and “that no one will take away their tourist visas.”

“In North Miami Beach, it is possible to have the injection of Pfizer for free. This is what we did and we had thousands and thousands of people who came to our door, ”he said in an interview on Facebook with Andrés Julián, the former mayor of Rionegro, in Colombia.

“Tourists only need their passport and the address of the hotel or consulate to be vaccinated,” said the mayor. And he said there is no risk that the townspeople will be left without their vaccine.

DeFillipo’s announcement, however, contradicts state governor Ron DeSantis, who has repeatedly said that only Florida residents can be vaccinated. However, the mayor follows in the footsteps of other states such as Texas, Arizona and Louisiana where unrestricted vaccination has already started.

Although medical tourism is not something new, lack of supply of doses against covid-19 has increased the number of Latin Americans who are traveling to the United States to be vaccinated. “It’s a phenomenon we’ve never seen before. Perhaps its intensity will decrease in a year and a half, when there will be greater access in the world “to vaccines, Jorge Baruch, professor of political science in global health and head of the traveler’s clinic at the National University Autonomous Region of Mexico (UNAM). The specialist assured that this phenomenon should recur in Mexico in a few months, because The countries of Central America and the Caribbean, due to their poverty situation, will be among the last to have access to vaccines.

The Honduran consulate was the first to react “Thanks to Major Anthony Defilipo for his help,” he wrote on his Twitter account, specifying where, how and with what documents his Honduran citizens can be vaccinated in North Miami Beach.

According to official CDC data, in Florida, 14,462,795 doses of vaccine have already been administered. The total number for the country is even more impressive: 228,661,408 have been vaccinated. Of these, 139,978,480 have at least one dose and 94,772,329 are already fully vaccinated.

Unlike in Latin American countries, where the majority of tourists who travel to the United States for an injection come from, 81.5% of older people already have at least one dose. and 67.5 already have both.

In the country, the developments of Moderna Inc, Pfizer / BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson are applied.

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