Mexico Demands Equity in Access to COVID-19 Vaccines

At the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) meeting held on Wednesday, Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard denounced the inequality in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines among countries.

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"We want to discuss it at the UN to ensure fairness and avoid vaccine hoarding so that all countries have the same possibility to vaccinate their inhabitants," Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) said previously.

Mexico described as unacceptable the U.S. position of reserving for itself all its national vaccine production, which goes against the World Health Organization (WHO) principle "no one is safe until we are all safe."

Last month, Mexican health authorities expected to receive over 1.4 million vaccines.

On Jan. 18,  however, they accepted a reduction in the pace of the Pfizer vaccine delivery in response to a UN call to share doses with poor nations. 

This Latin American country went on a month without new supplies until Feb. 14, when a shipment of 870,000 AstraZeneca vaccines arrived from India. This allowed Mexico to resume the elderly population vaccination.

As of Wednesday morning, Mexico had reported 2,004,575 COVID-19 cases and 175,986 related deaths.