Nearly a year after the COVID-19 pandemic, Mexico is entering its darkest phase yet.
More people are infected than ever before, including the country’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Hospitals in many countries are almost capacity, fans and oxygen tanks are scarce and there seems to be a new record number every day.
In a temporary medical center set up on a military base in Mexico City, the morgue no longer has space.
“In the end, you just pile people up in heaps,” said Dr. Giorgio Alberto Franyuti Kelly, head of biosecurity for the military, said treating patients in the temporary hospital.
Large-scale vaccination is widely seen as the most obvious way out. However, the government announced last week that its vaccination program – one of the most ambitious in Latin America – has actually come to a standstill.
The country of 128 million people received only 766,350 doses of vaccine, all manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech.
The amount would reach 1.5 million by the end of the month, but Pfizer now says it cannot meet the target because it is renovating one of its factories in Europe to eventually increase production.
Mexican officials described the delay as a minor setback, saying Pfizer’s shipment was expected to resume on February 15.
“It is simply going to be temporarily postponed,” Mexico’s deputy secretary of health, Dr. Hugo López-Gatell, said leading the country’s pandemic response.
But health experts have warned that vaccination discontinuation could have serious consequences, as about half a million medical workers who receive an initial dose will be forced to wait longer than is optimal for the critical second dose.
Pfizer says his shots should be given three weeks apart.
López-Gatell said there was no reason to panic, pointing to studies showing that the vaccine could still be effective if the second dose was administered within four weeks.
After the threat of the coronavirus was not recognized early in the pandemic and the widespread testing was done to combat it, the Mexican government received praise for its vaccination strategy.
Early on, Mexico entered into agreements with several companies working on vaccines, and it was the first country in Latin America to begin vaccination on December 24th.
Officials here said they had already entered into transactions to purchase enough vaccine to vaccinate the entire country.
They have signed agreements with Pfizer, the Chinese CanSino Biologics and the British company AstraZeneca to buy enough vaccine for 128 million people. They are also trying to set up enough of the Sputnik V vaccine from Russia for another 12 million.
Acquisition of a variety of companies is helping to diversify the risk and protect Mexico from unforeseen events, such as the delivery of Pfizer this month, say foreign ministry officials who helped negotiate the deals. There is still no official delivery date for vaccines from most companies.
The Pfizer delay could not have come at a worse time.
Mexico officially recorded nearly 150,000 official COVID-19 deaths – the fourth highest death toll in the world – although officials admit that the true score is much higher. Last year, the country counted 274,486 more deaths of all kinds than in a normal year, and health experts said the vast majority were likely to be due to the pandemic.
Epidemiologists blame the current boom during the Christmas holidays, when many families gathered in large groups despite pleas from health authorities.
They said deaths over the past week were likely due to rallies on Dec. 24. An even bigger wave of deaths is expected in the next five weeks, as a result of celebrations on the first year and Three Kings Day on 6 January. .
“It’s a giant snowball,” said Dr. Laurie Ann Ximénez-Fyvie, who runs the microbiology laboratory at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told the Reforma newspaper. “What is currently happening is a perfect storm, the result of three holidays each week.”
For doctors in COVID-19 wards, work has become a nightmare that is becoming more frightening every day.
“The death toll from COVID-19 is getting bigger and bigger,” said Franyuti, the military doctor.
During several long shifts over the past few weeks, he was one of only a handful of physicians caring for more than 100 critically ill coronavirus patients. Without enough ventilators, he sometimes sees patients gasping for breath until they die.
This is what happened last week to a 35-year-old named Pedro.
“I had to let him die in pain because I had no place to transfer him,” Franyuti said. “I could only hold his hand.”
He expressed anger that Mexico City was waiting until the end of December to enter into a second exclusion, despite data showing that business was on the rise, and he was upset that the city had allowed restaurants to eat outside.
“You need to take measures that limit people’s ability to put themselves at risk,” he said.
The vaccine distributed so far appears to be almost exclusively to health professionals in the front line. Franyuti, who recently received his second dose, said he was encouraged to follow the distribution guidelines – a notable achievement in a country often hampered by corruption.
López Obrador has announced that he has tested positive for COVID-19 and that he is experiencing mild symptoms on Sunday. The president almost never wears a mask in public, not even during his daily news conferences, which are sometimes attended by dozens of officials and journalists.
Some people have criticized López Obrador, a center-left populist who has gained high officials since taking office in 2018, for his pandemic response, including his refusal to invest in widespread tests. But he was willing to spend money when it came to drawing up a robust vaccination plan.
Initially, the president insisted that all vaccination efforts be carried out exclusively by the military, after which he has repeatedly resorted to dealing with a variety of civilian matters over the past few years, from infrastructure projects to immigration enforcement.
But last week, following the news of the Pfizer delay and the intense pressure from state politicians, he gave the country’s governors permission to purchase vaccines themselves as long as they only buy vaccines approved for use in Mexico.
Local leaders welcomed the decision, although some criticized the president for waiting a month and a half to authorize them, saying global competition for vaccines would take more than a year.
“There has been talk of the world’s supply of vaccines,” said Miguel Riquelme, the governor of the state of Coahuila, which borders Texas.
The prospect of long waiting times has fueled concerns about a black market.
The Federal Commission for Health Protection – the Mexican version of the US Food and Drug Administration – warned last week about the illegal sale of vaccines on the internet, pharmacies and hospitals.
In particular, it drew attention to the unauthorized sale of a vaccine manufactured by Moderna, which was not approved for use in Mexico. Officials are presumably concerned about the Modern vaccine being smuggled across the United States border, where it is being produced.
There is also increasing talk of ‘vaccine tourism’, in which people travel with means to countries where the vaccine is more available. Private doctors, who were not part of the initial vaccination plan, said they were going to the US to be vaccinated.
Last week, Florida General Surgeon Scott Rivkees issued an opinion requiring those who distribute vaccines across the state to verify that the patient is at least a part-time Florida resident. The move follows after several news reports suggested that wealthy people from other countries, including Mexico, had traveled there to be vaccinated.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.