MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexico successfully completed a three-month campaign to vaccinate all adult residents in communities bordering the United States against COVID-19, the government said Tuesday.
The Mexican government indicated that at the time of launching the campaign last June, it was hopeful that large-scale inoculation would help lift pandemic-related restrictions on non-essential cross-border shipments, something that has not happened yet.
The federal Secretary of Public Safety reported that it would administer the last 64,000 doses on Tuesday to residents of the state of Tamaulipas, bordering Texas. In total, the program applied 3.8 million doses in 45 municipalities and cities in the six states that border the United States.
The United States donated about 1.35 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to help support the campaign.
Mexican authorities said the goal was to boost vaccination rates at the border to levels similar to those on the US side. Once that level was reached, they assumed there would be no reason to continue restrictions on transfers to the other side of the border.
The project became one of the priorities for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador due to the importance of the cross-border economy for the north of the country.
So far, Mexico has received around 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines and around 61 million inhabitants have received at least one dose.
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