CAMPECHE, Mexico – Over the past few weeks, thousands of public schoolteachers have been queuing up outside schools and hospitals in this southern state when naval helicopters buzzed overhead with a precious consignment sent to them exclusively by Mexico’s president: Covid-19 vaccines.
The government’s own guidelines call for frontline hospital workers and the elderly in Mexico’s hard-hit cities to be captured first. But teachers in rural Mexico are an important voting bloc.
Critics of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador say the vaccination of teachers before all doctors is the latest evidence of how the left-wing president plays politics with vaccinations in a country with the third highest official Covid-19 death toll in the world, nearly 180,000. And instead of giving state health workers the usual guidance, according to the usual protocol, the government uses Mr. López Obrador officials of his welfare arm, ‘Servants of the Nation’, recognizable by the vests they wear with the national emblem of Mexico.
Campeche is one of several key states holding the midterm elections in June. Polls show that Morena party of Mr. López Obrador has the chance to oust the former ruling PRI, who has ruled Campeche since the late 1920s. Although many countries have made teachers a priority for vaccination programs during the coronavirus pandemic, they are usually not in front of health workers.
Inside hospitals, health workers were furious because the government had vaccinated teachers while nearly half of the state’s doctors and nurses were still waiting.