Starting in April, up to 600,000 elderly people a day will be vaccinated against Covid-19, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said on Monday.
Appearing in person at the Ministry of Health’s press conference on coronavirus for the first time since he recovered from his own fight against Covid-19, López-Gatell said vaccinations will accelerate because Mexico will begin receiving more vaccines early next month.
“As of April, we will have practically twice as much [current] weekly or monthly supply of vaccines, ”said the coronavirus scorer, adding that government vaccination brigades will focus on inoculating people in major cities across the country.
“We will be able to include the capitals [in the vaccination program] – cities with one, two, three or five million inhabitants; we will be able to enter them and cover an entire city in eight days, ”said López-Gatell, referring to universal vaccination for the elderly, not the entire adult population.
The application of 600 thousand doses per day would allow the inoculation of 18 million people, which means that the government would reach its new goal of giving at least one injection to the country’s approximately 15 million elderly people by the end of next month.
President López Obrador said on Monday that all Mexican seniors will receive at least one dose by the end of April, a goal that has changed several times. The initial promise was that older people over 60 would be fully vaccinated by the end of March.
The new target is still ambitious considering that only 2.95 million elderly people have received the dose so far, according to data from the Ministry of Health presented on Monday night. To inoculate 15 million by April 30, an average of about 260,000 doses will have to be administered every day by the end of next month. It looks like most of the work will take place in the next month.
Only 52,228 doses were administered on Monday, according to preliminary data from the Ministry of Health, bringing the total number of injections given to just over 4.4 million.
In addition to the 2.9 million elderly people, about 829,000 health workers were vaccinated, including more than 590,000 who received two doses of vaccine, and more than 17,000 teachers were fully vaccinated. Mexico has already received nearly 7.2 million doses after a shipment of 667,875 doses from Pfizer arrived in Mexico City on Tuesday morning.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said on Tuesday that the United States will provide information on Friday about sending AstraZeneca vaccines – of which the United States has stocks but does not use them to inoculate citizens – to Mexico.
“We will have an answer on Friday and provide details on that day,” said Ebrard, adding that “good progress” has been made in discussions with the United States
He did not disclose how many AstraZeneca injections Mexico could receive or how much he would pay for them, but the government ordered as many injections as possible. López Obrador said on Sunday that he was confident that the United States would supply Covid-19 vaccines to Mexico, as China, Russia and India have already done.
Unlike the United States, Mexico approved the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine and López-Gatell said last week that it would continue to be used here, although several European countries have temporarily suspended its use while the development of blood clots among a small number of recipients is investigated.
He predicted on Monday that the World Health Organization (WHO) will soon issue a report ruling out links between the vaccine and thrombosis.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday that thrombosis cases are not necessarily linked to vaccination, but it is routine practice to investigate them.
“So far, it does not seem that there are more cases than expected for the general population,” said WHO’s deputy director-general, Mariângela Batista Galvão Simão.
Mexico has so far received only one shipment of 870,000 AstraZeneca shots that were manufactured by the Serum Institute of India. It will receive another shipment of more than 1 million shots from India and also has an agreement to purchase more than 40 million shots that will be made in Argentina and bottled here.
Injections from Pfizer, Sinovac and Sputnik V have also been used in Mexico, while China’s CanSino single injection vaccine has been approved by the federal health regulator, but has not yet been administered.
Meanwhile, the number of cumulative cases in Mexico increased by just 1,439 on Monday, to just under 2.17 million. It was the lowest single-day case count since May 11 last year, when 1,305 cases were reported.
The official death toll for Covid-19 increased to 194,944 with an additional 234 deaths. It was only the third time this year that the daily number of reported deaths was below 300, after 220 deaths were recorded on Sunday and 247 were added the same day a week earlier.
Source: El Economista (sp), Reforma (sp), Milenio (sp)