Speaking yesterday at President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s (AMLO) daily press conference, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard addressed the issue of inequity in vaccine access, something he and AMLO have repeatedly raised publicly. Also present at the briefing was special guest, Bolivian President Luis Arce Catacora, who has been fighting to obtain vaccines for his nation. Ebrard criticized the UN’s COVAX mechanism for not acting quickly enough, and referred to Lopez Obrador’s earlier statements that there are 67 nations in the world that still haven’t acquired a single dose of vaccine, while ten nations hoard 70% of all vaccines. “This isn’t fair…,” said Ebrard. “The only way to leave the pandemic behind is if we all have access…. If today, multinational institutions can’t guarantee this, then what?”
Ebrard particularly stressed the importance of technology transfer that will allow countries to produce vaccines, pointing to the agreement made this year between Argentina’s mAbxience lab and Mexico’s Liomont Lab to jointly produce AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccine. Argentina provides the active vaccine ingredient and Liomont does the bottling and packaging. The Foreign Minister also reiterated Mexico’s stance, as presented previously to the UN Security Council, that patents must be made available, or “liberated,” as he put it. “Now would be the time for the many big pharmaceutical companies that have developed the technology to produce vaccines—many of them with public funds from their countries—to place [that technology] at the disposition of the entire world.”
