Jude Webber
Mexican business leaders hope this week to reach a deal with health authorities that would allow them to buy doses of Covid-19 vaccines in addition to those already ordered by the government to administer to their staff.
Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has guaranteed free, universal access to Covid vaccines and the government has bought enough doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab to inoculate 125,000 people, starting with health care workers in Mexico City and the Pacific state of Colima.
Business leaders told the government they could support the vaccination effort with their distribution chains and using their facilities as vaccination centres.
“Many companies would be more than able and willing to also pay for the vaccines if this gave them access to additional amounts to be able to administer to their workers,” said Patrick Devlyn, president of the health commission of the CCE, Mexico’s biggest employer lobby.
Although Mexicans should not have to pay for the vaccine, Mr Devlyn said it was “not very productive” to keep higher risk workers off work because of the danger of them catching Covid-19.
A resident wears a mask on a street in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
“It would be cheaper to pay for the vaccine than to keep them on the bench,” he said, stressing any such plan would be “completely voluntary”. The Pfizer/BioNTech jab costs about $12 per shot, he said.
Mexico City and surrounding areas, home to a quarter of the population, this weekend went back into the highest level of restrictions under which all non-essential services are shuttered because of an alarming rise in hospitalisations.
Mr Devlyn said he expected further talks with Hugo López-Gatell, health undersecretary, and Zoé Robledo, head of the state social security institute, IMSS, on Monday to hammer out the details.
Mexico has pre-ordered the Pfizer/BioNTech, Astra Zeneca/Oxford university and CanSino vaccines and plans to roll-out inoculation over the course of 2021, according to age.
Mr Devlyn said the government was expecting to buy 30m additional vaccine doses in February and the private sector could piggy-back on that order with its own order, which he said could be for as many as 4m people.