MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s health regulator yesterday granted emergency authorisation to the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, said Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell.
“Mexico is the fourth country whose health regulatory agency, Cofepris, has granted emergency use authorisation to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine,” he told a news conference.
In fact, Britain, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have already given the vaccine emergency approval, making Mexico the fifth country to do so.
The Mexican government this week announced that it will begin vaccinations against Covid-19 at the end of the month, with a first batch of 250,000 doses to immunise 125,000 people, since the vaccine requires two shots.
But to start the programme requires approval of the drug by Cofepris.
Priority will go to medical staff on the front lines of the pandemic, and doses will be administered only here and in the northern state of Coahuila, due to the specialist deep-freeze and logistics requirements of the vaccine.
Mexico signed an agreement to purchase 34.4 million doses of the jab.
After the initial round of vaccinations, it hopes to reach a rate of one million a month between January and March, and 12 million in April, said the government.
Mexico also has preliminary purchase agreements with Chinese-Canadian project CanSinoBio for 35 million doses of its vaccine candidate, and with British firm AstraZeneca for 77.4 million doses.
It is also part of the international Covax mechanism, which allows it to buy another 51.6 million doses.
With more than 113,000 Covid-19 deaths and 1.22 million cases as of yesterday, Mexico – a country of 128 million people – is the fourth-worst-hit nation in the world. – AFP, December 12, 2020
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