Mexico approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for emergency use on Monday, the country’s leading epidemiologist, Hugo López-Gatell, announced in a tweet on Monday night. It is the fourth country to approve the vaccine.
The Foreign Secretary of Mexico, Marcelo Ebrard, had previously said approval was “imminent”.
Mr. Ebrard celebrated the approval on Monday night as “very good news”, tweeting that would allow the country to start production “very soon”. AstraZeneca said in August that it would work with the Mexican and Argentine governments to produce 150 million starting doses for distribution throughout Latin America and subsequently produce at least 400 million doses for the region.
Last week, Britain became the first country to grant emergency approval for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. Argentina soon followed suit. India said on Sunday that it also approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
On Monday, an 82-year-old dialysis patient in Oxford was the first person in the world to receive the clinically authorized and fully tested Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine when Britain started administering the vaccine.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca injection is about to become the dominant form of inoculation in the world. Costing $ 3 to $ 4 a dose, it is a fraction of the cost of some other vaccines.
And it can be shipped and stored in regular refrigerators for six months, instead of the ultracold freezers required by the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, making it easier to administer in poorer and more difficult to access areas.
López-Gatell said he incorrectly reported that a single-dose vaccine that passed phase three tests in Mexico by the Canadian-Canadian firm CanSino was approved, according to The Associated Press.
The United States and the European Union have indicated that they are unlikely to authorize the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine until at least February.
When given in two doses of full force, the regimen authorized by Great Britain, the AstraZeneca vaccine showed 62 percent effectiveness in clinical trials – considerably lower than the 95 percent effectiveness achieved by Pfizer injections and Modern. No one who received the vaccine in clinical trials developed severe Covid-19 or was hospitalized.
Much of the world is looking to AstraZeneca in part because it has set more ambitious manufacturing goals than other Western vaccine manufacturers. He said he hopes to make up to three billion doses this year – an amount that, with two doses per person, would be enough to inoculate almost one in five people worldwide. The company has pledged to make the vaccine available at cost throughout the world by at least July 2021, and in poorer countries forever.
Mexico has the fourth highest number of coronavirus deaths in the world, according to a New York Times database, and the 13th highest number of coronavirus cases.
The country reported almost 1.5 million infections and 127,213 Mexicans died from the virus.
But Mexico’s transparency with the severity of the virus in the country has been uneven. Last month, federal officials told the public that the number of cases in the capital, Mexico City, had not reached a level that required – according to their own standards – a blockade. A New York Times analysis using the government’s own official figures found that the city had exceeded that level.
In the spring, The Times reported that the federal government was not reporting hundreds and potentially thousands of coronavirus deaths in the capital.
An earlier version of this item incorrectly stated when Mexico’s foreign minister said approval of the vaccine was “imminent”.