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Mexico (AFP)
“We started with the application of the 1st dose of the vaccine against # COVID19 for children between 12 and 17 years of age with comorbidities,” the government of Mexico City highlighted on Twitter this Monday.
The state of Baja California (northwest), bordering the United States, also began the application of the biological to minors with serious illnesses.
Accompanied by their parents, the minors, some in school uniforms, went to the vaccination centers.
“They had said that the children were not going to vaccinate them, and if we as adults are at risk, they are even more at risk, and now more when they have returned to classes and have contact with more children,” Ivette Martínez, mother, told AFP. of a minor with Asperger’s.
The federal government did not include children under 18 years of age in its national immunization plan, arguing, above all, that exposing them at an early age to the vaccine could limit their immune systems.
However, a court ruled this month that the government must modify its policy so that minors between 12 and 17 years old are immunized in a generalized way, a ruling that the government said it is analyzing.
Children in Mexico City, the epicenter of the pandemic, receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the only one approved for that sector.
Some 25 million primary, secondary and high school students returned to face-to-face classes on August 30.
Since then, some parents have appealed to justice for the vaccination of their children, achieving the immunization of some minors.
This paved the way for 15-year-old Paola Abigail Chocooj, sick with type 1 diabetes, to receive her first vaccination on Monday.
Her mother Ileana Silva, 47, lived “very nervous” that the minor was infected, and after the immunization she received this Monday, she says that she is “a little bit calm.”
In Mexico 69.9 million adults have been vaccinated.
With 126 million inhabitants, Mexico is the fourth worst hit country in the world by the coronavirus in absolute numbers, with 286,346 deaths and 3.7 million accumulated cases, according to official figures.
© 2021 AFP
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