How Mexico Forgot Its Covid Crisis
Every weekday morning, Mexico’s president holds a rambling televised celebration of his supposed successes: a news conference with special guests, video clips, and slick graphics that often has the air of a variety show. Until mid-January one of the favored features was a giant graphic that showcased Mexico’s undisputed progress as the first Latin American nation to vaccinate its citizens against Covid-19. Then the data turned bad. Pfizer Inc., at the time Mexico’s only supplier of Covid shots, halved, then completely stopped, deliveries. Vaccinations remained unchanged for almost a month; deaths surged. The vaccine tracker got yanked from the show.
Mexican viewers didn’t know it from watching President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s daily discourse, but Mexico was becoming one of the world’s deadliest Covid hot spots. The government’s alternate version of reality included an undercounting of cases and deaths, something it belatedly acknowledged in March when it announced that Covid-related deaths were far higher than the official count, which stood at about 234,000 as of July 5. More expansive estimates can be derived from excess deaths, the epidemiological term for increased mortality compared with an average year. In one such analysis, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation places Mexico’s Covid deaths at about 540,000.
During his morning broadcast on Jan. 18, López Obrador swerved around an uncomfortable truth: Pfizer had just shunted Mexico to the back of the line for limited supplies while it closed a plant in Belgium for upgrades. He spun a different tale: that he was altruistically acceding to a (nonexistent) request by the United Nations to give up shots so Pfizer could boost production to supply poorer nations “that don’t have the economic possibility to buy vaccines.” AMLO, as the president is known, claimed that he approved the Pfizer cut because “it would be unjust and inhumane and contradictory” not to. “We have to walk together, be supportive,” he said. On his YouTube channel, the news conference was titled “Redistribution of Covid-19 vaccines is an act of solidarity.”
What was actually happening was entirely out of Mexico’s hands. Yes, Pfizer’s retooling of its Belgian factory would eventually lead to greater global supply. But in the short term, the company made decisions about where it would send its vials and where it wouldn’t. It chose to make cuts in Latin America and Europe while sending millions of shots to Israel. The difference was that Israel had just signed a data-sharing deal with Pfizer, which would flood the country with its vaccine to test its real-world effectiveness—good for science and, of course, Pfizer.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-15/mexico-covid-crisis-amlo-government-s-response-ahead-of-delta-variant