Vaccination Rates Slowdown, Cases Climb

In Mexico, over 16.5 million people are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and over 27.7 million have received at least one dose, states the Ministry of Health. After a slow start over six months ago, vaccination programs picked up speed over the past few months but the rate slowed again during June.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledged the slowdown in his daily conference last Friday but also highlighted that reports that linked the slowdown with the poor election results were made in “bad faith,” reports El País. López Obrador claimed that the rate at which vaccine batches were arriving to the country and the number of vaccines per batch may have influenced the decrease but he reiterated his plan to have vaccinated all adult Mexicans by October 2021.

Mexico has been receiving large vaccine batches during the past few weeks, including a 1.4 million batch of Pfizer vaccines received last week, reports the Ministry of Health. On Monday, Mexico received a 1.2 million batch of AstraZeneca vaccines, the 10th batch it has received from the British pharmaceutical for a total of 13.51 million vaccines, states the Ministry of Health.

In total, Mexico has received or packaged 50.29 million doses from Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Sinovac, Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology, CanSino Biologics and Johnson & Johnson.

Despite the progress of vaccination campaigns, the Mexican government is still concerned about the climbing number of positive cases the country is facing. "The rate (of COVID-19 cases) began to rise this week. This does not necessarily mean that the downward trend has already been lost, as it can behave similarly to a staircase or a zigzag," said the Undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion, Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez, according to the Ministry of Health. López-Gatell urged the federal government, states, municipalities, communities and citizens to work together to keep the downward trend. To date, Mexico City, Baja California and Zacatecas have the highest vaccination rates, according to the Ministry of Health.