Mexico receives 1.5 million AstraZeneca vaccines against COVID-19 shipped by the United States

Mexico received this Sunday a batch of 1.5 million vaccines from the Anglo-Swedish laboratory AstraZeneca against him coronavirus, which was sent by the government of USA after an agreement between the two countries reached in mid-March.

This is the first part of the 2.7 million doses that the US government promised to send to Mexico.

“Mexico thanks the government of President (Joe) Biden for its authorization to AstraZeneca to send 2.7 million doses of vaccines manufactured by that company to our country ”, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said on Twitter earlier.

“It is a very significant endorsement at a critical moment that accounts for the close cooperation of both nations”added.

In mid-March, the White House said it planned to ship millions of doses of AstraZeneca’s covid vaccine to Mexico and Canada, which has already been approved in both countries but awaits the green light from the US Food and Drug Administration. States (FDA).

Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador held a virtual meeting at the beginning of March in which key issues on the bilateral agenda were addressed, such as migration, but also access to vaccines against covid-19.

The Mexican president has repeatedly criticized the “hoarding” that the world’s richest countries would make of the production of vaccines against the new coronavirus.

Mexico, of 126 million inhabitants, began to vaccinate on December 24 the medical personnel who care for covid-19 patients and on February 15 began to immunize people over 60 years old, who number about 15 million in the country , according to official data.

Mexico is the third in the world with the most fatalities from covid-19 after the United States and Brazil, with just over 200,000 deaths since the virus arrived more than a year ago.