MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican authorities announced Wednesday that the country has finally developed its own vaccine against COVID-19, more than two years after vaccines from the United States, Europe and China were released.
It was not clear how they would put the vaccine, called “Patria,” which was implemented in a joint effort between the government and the private Mexican company Laboratorio Avi-Mex, SA (Avimex), which previously worked on vaccines for animals.
The application in Mexico of vaccines against the coronavirus was drastically reduced at the end of 2022 and so far in 2023. The country still has millions of doses of the Abdala vaccine that it bought from Cuba.
María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces, general director of the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt), said on Wednesday that the new vaccine would be approved for use as a booster dose, complying with criteria established by the World Health Organization.
The country started developing the “Patria” vaccine in March 2020, but trials were slow and the country ended up importing 225 million doses, mainly from AstraZeneca and Pfizer, and some Chinese vaccines.
It also acquired nine million doses of the Abdala vaccine, manufactured in Cuba, in September 2022, despite the fact that it was designed for the variants of the coronavirus that were circulating in 2020 or 2021, not for the current variants. Few Mexicans have come forward to receive the Cuban booster shots.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has worked to make Mexico self-sufficient in many industries while supporting Cuba.
Álvarez-Buylla affirmed that the Mexican medicine “opens the way in the recovery of sovereignty in vaccines.”
The official number of test-confirmed COVID-19 deaths in Mexico stands at almost 334,000, but testing was sparse in the early days of the pandemic and the government’s own review of death certificates shows more than 505,000 deaths in Mexico. for which COVID-19 was listed as the cause of death.
