Politics: Local and global barriers to the vaccination effort
The spread of Covid-19 in Mexico has proven much worse this winter than had been expected, with no break in sight. The latest evidence points out that the country is among the worst nations in managing the pandemic.
Despite the gravity of the situation, the government failed to rectify its mistaken strategy for containing the coronavirus’s spread and prioritized keeping the economy open, going so far in early December as to insist that hard-hit Mexico City had yet to reach contagion levels requiring full lockdown measures when, in fact, that threshold had already been breached. Instead, the government bet everything on a massive immunization effort with an ambitious vaccination schedule for the entire population over age 16, which it announced on December 8. But it took officials more than a month to describe how they planned to deliver the promised 94 million doses, and the outline was not encouraging. Bypassing the public healthcare system and the 65,000 highly trained health care personnel engaged in the vaccination system Mexico has employed for decades – or the private sector and state-level health services, for that matter – vaccine delivery is expected to be the work of brigades comprised mainly of AMLO’s "servants of the nation" crews, with no history of medical training. People are to be inoculated not at medical facilities or pharmacies but rather at locations from which social programs hand out cash transfers, a crucial cog in the president’s political operation. And by the time this delivery system was announced, López Obrador’s master plan had already gone off the rails from a severe vaccine shortfall. With Pfizer having suspended deliveries at least until mid February, and Astra Zeneca vaccines not expected to start arriving until sometime in March, the government has been scrambling for alternatives, including a commitment to acquire 24 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V.
Even after the vaccines start arriving, the lack of transparency with which the government has handled the pandemic and the constant flow of contradictory information and arguments from officials will do little to convince an increasingly skeptical public that they should trust the injections.
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