“We should not be consumerists,” said President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), declaring that Mexico will not be held hostage by pharmaceutical companies in regard to whether to buy COVID vaccines for children.
He said, “We have to prioritize. We have to know if they are required or not required, not be subjected, subordinated to the pharmaceutical companies being the ones that tell us that a third dose is missing, a fourth dose is missing, they need to vaccinate children.”
However, AMLO said that he will abide by what scientists and international organizations say about the vaccination of children.
“We have to see if it is scientifically necessary. It’s like when you go to buy something. We should not be consumers. You have to buy what you need, not go to the supermarket or the self-service store and buy to buy.”
The undersecretary of health, Hugo López Gatell said, “There is no scientific evidence that vaccinating children is required, that booster doses are required, or that there is particular concern that the variants are more virulent, not even the Delta variant.”
At the same time, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) warned that some minors can develop a more serious and even fatal multisystemic inflammatory syndrome from the coronavirus.
In his most recent weekly conference, Sylvain Aldighieri, PAHO’s Incident Manager for COVID-19, said that, since May 2020, “24 countries and territories in the Americas have reported 6,681 cumulative confirmed cases of this multisystem inflammatory syndrome, including 135 deaths in minors. This situation, is extremely dangerous. We risk an avalanche of health problems that will worsen in the Americas” due to the lack of vaccines.