The Mexican government’s plan B to cover the vaccine shortage has not yet materialized. Negotiations with Russia have delayed the first shipment of Sputnik V to Mexico, scheduled for this week, without a deadline for delivery yet being defined. The unforeseen events have left the Latin American country in limbo, which in mid-February will complete a month without receiving batches from Pfizer, the only drug that it has been able to use in its national vaccination campaign.
Mexico approved last Tuesday the emergency use of Sputnik V. Its arrival has raised great expectations, after the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, agreed in a telephone call with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to send 24 million of doses for the next months at the end of last January. The news grabbed the headlines, ignited debates on social networks and became a hope to accelerate vaccination in the country, which has only been able to immunize less than 1% of its inhabitants, according to official data. The deadline for the first delivery that Juan Ferrer, director of the Health Institute for Well-being, and that López Obrador himself gave was the first week of February, without specifying a specific date.
The main stumbling block in the negotiations has been a series of amendments to the agreement. A misplaced “semicolon” and a “poorly qualified subsection” have caused the contract to travel back and forth between Mexico City and Moscow without being able to close, Hugo López-Gatell, Undersecretary of Health, commented this week. The Mexican spokesman for the pandemic said on Thursday night that the changes to the agreement are not “substantive” and that the Mexican government has already signed what for them is “the final version.”
A journalist asked López-Gatell if he believed that the Russian vaccine would arrive before Pfizer’s, which had to delay shipments in mid-January due to adjustments in its production chain to meet global demand for vaccines. “You have to do a pool, we don’t know”, recognized the undersecretary. This same week, the official said that, since the contract had not been closed, Mexico was not yet subject to payment, although he said he was “eager” for the invoice to arrive to give an advance. If the Kremlin accepts the final version of the agreement, it will return it signed and attach a delivery schedule within 48 hours. CanSino’s Chinese vaccine, which could not be applied because it has not been approved, has requested authorization from health regulators on Friday after concluding its clinical trials in Mexico, according to Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard.
On January 19, a couple of days after it was announced that Pfizer could not meet its delivery commitments, the López Obrador government estimated that between January 25 and February 12, one million doses would arrive, among them, 900,000 from Russia. The announcements that have followed since then suggest that this calculation cannot be met either. The first shipment of Sputnik V will be, according to Mexican authorities, about 200,000 doses.
Ten days later, in the first appearance of López Obrador in public after catching COVID-19, the president focused a good part of his message on giving certainty about the flow of vaccines. The president said he had contacted AstraZeneca to bring 870,000 vaccines from India in February and that a similar number of doses would arrive from Russia. Last Tuesday, the Ministry of Foreign Relations once again adjusted expectations downwards: only 400,000 doses of Sputnik V are planned in February. On January 19, six million doses were scheduled from Russia to arrive between March 1 and April 2, the latest forecast of the Foreign Ministry for March is only one million doses. The Russian vaccine has had a winding road to Mexico: its purchase was agreed before being authorized by health regulators, its arrival was announced before the contracts were finalized and it was politicized weeks before it could be applied.
Delivery delays have also affected Argentina, the first country in Latin America to buy Sputnik V, reports Federico Rivas Molina from Buenos Aires. The Government of Alberto Fernández expected five million doses by the end of January, but so far it has only received 880,000. The figure includes the 300,000 that arrived before Christmas on a special Aerolineas Argentinas flight sent to Moscow from Buenos Aires, and which allowed the South American country to join the list of the few countries that by then had started the vaccination campaign against the covid -19.
Russia was unable to fulfill its commitment to Argentina and last week acknowledged the delays, in this case more related to problems in its supply chain than to bureaucratic obstacles. Kirill Dmitriev, director of the Russian Fund for Direct Investment, in charge of funding laboratory research, said that “there may be a delay in some of the production, but it is understandable because vaccines use many components.” The Argentine government, however, has paid the political cost of the Russian delay, after having promised a massive vaccination campaign before March that it will not be able to fulfill.
Faced with a global slump in the supply of vaccines, Mexico is confident that its strategy of diversifying its options – also having agreements with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, CanSino and the multilateral initiative Covax – will minimize the risks of a longer impasse. While hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have turned to register online on the page that the Government enabled, waiting for their turn to vaccinate, the authorities hope that the dose stop will be unlocked, at a time when the country already exceeds 1, 9 million cases confirmed by the pandemic.
source https://pledgetimes.com/negotiations-with-russia-delay-the-arrival-of-sputnik-v-in-mexico/
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