By Cassandra Garrison
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Private health care workers in Mexico are protesting that they are being left out of the government’s COVID-19 vaccination system, just as the country is making a possible third wave of infections.
Outraged at what they see as discrimination by a government that prioritises the public sector, hundreds of health workers who gathered outside a medical school last week in hopes of being vaccinated finally sang, “we want the vaccine.”
About 500 of the protesters finally got their wish that day.
“We realized we were not even considered,” said David Berrones, an ophthalmologist in Mexico City, who last month instituted an informal census of medical professionals awaiting a jab.
The government said it did include private health care workers in the initial vaccination plans, but that efforts to reach them all were hampered by unreliable staff registers.
Mexico’s doctors paid a heavy price in the crisis. According to the latest official data, at least 3,679 medical personnel have been killed in the pandemic that has so far killed more than 200,000 people in Mexico. According to Amnesty International, the toll is the highest worldwide for health workers.
The government has warned that a new increase in infections could follow this past Easter holiday.
Berrones and other frustrated medical professionals argue that the left-wing government of Mexico prefers public sector employees. Although Mexico’s official figures suggest that thousands of health workers are still awaiting vaccinations, there is no distinction between the public and private sectors.
According to government figures, Mexico has employed 964,000 public health workers since 2019.
Reuters could not determine how many health workers are in the private sector in Mexico. Berrones said more than 28,700 medical and dental staff had signed his census since March 11, including some from the public sector.
By April 7, more than 877,500 health workers had been vaccinated with at least one dose, without any division between the public or the private sector.
Mexico has so far administered nearly 9.7 million doses of vaccine across the country. Senior citizens and teachers were also prioritized.
By comparison, Brazil, which vaccinated a similar portion of the population, administered more than 7.3 million doses of vaccination to health workers. Argentina gave 1.5 million doses to health workers. Like Mexico, Brazil and Argentina do not differentiate between public and private sector workers in their data.
Asked how many health care workers had been vaccinated in the private sector, Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the coronavirus tsar in Mexico, said this week that the government was protecting all health workers needed.
Lopez-Gatell said efforts to identify medical professionals at risk of infection were being made by ‘inflated’ private-sector staffing lists.
The Mexican Ministry of Health did not respond to requests for comment.
One gynecologist in Mexico City said he and colleagues in a small private hospital were still not vaccinated, although they also had to work in a public hospital under a compulsory social program.
“Once you can buy the vaccine in the United States, I will go,” he told Reuters on condition of anonymity, fearing it could cost him his job.
More than forty doctors at his hospital have signed a letter, dated March 19 and seen by Reuters, demanding vaccinations. But they have not come yet, he said.
Meanwhile, the National Academy of Medicine in Mexico has called on the government to consider all doctors ‘as a group vulnerable to the disease,’ posted in a March 12 letter on its website.
“It’s like going to war,” the gynecologist said. ‘Who are the people you are going to give guns to first? Soldiers, right? ‘
(Reported by Cassandra Garrison; edited by Bill Berkrot)