MEXICO CITY. Two years behind the United States, Europe and China – and with the pandemic practically over – Mexico announces that it has developed its own vaccine against Covid-19. Mexican officials celebrated the event on Wednesday. It is now unclear what use will be made of the vaccine – called ‘Patria’ or ‘Motherland’, developed in a joint effort between the government and a Mexican company, Avimex, which had previously worked on animal vaccines.
Vaccine use in Mexico declined precipitously in late 2022 and early 2023, and the country still has millions of doses of the Abdala vaccine it bought from Cuba. María Elena Álvarez-Buylla, head of Mexico’s government commission for science and technology, he then said that the new vaccine “will be approved for use as a booster dose”. She did not say whether the government’s medical approval agency had formally approved the “Patria” vaccine. Dr Fidel Alejandro Sánchez, who sits on the board of researchers tasked with following variants of the virus in Mexico, said he had doubts about using a vaccine designed two years ago as a booster to protect against currently circulating strains. “It’s like reading yesterday’s newspaper,” says Sánchez. “There’s no point in using it as a booster when it wasn’t designed for that.”
Mexico began developing the Patria vaccine in March 2020. But testing was slow and the country ended up importing 225 million doses, mainly Astra-Zeneca and Pfizer, and some Chinese vaccines. Mexico bought 9 million doses of the Cuban-made Abdala vaccine in September 2022, even though it was designed for coronavirus variants circulating in 2020 or 2021, not current variants.
Few Mexicans showed up to get Cuban booster shots. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has sought to make Mexico self-sufficient in many areas while supporting Cuba however he can. “This opens the door to recovering vaccine sovereignty,” Álvarez-Buylla said.
The official Covid-19 death toll confirmed by testing in Mexico is nearly 334,000, but testing was scarce in the early days of the pandemic, and government review of death certificates show more than 505,000 deaths in which the coronavirus has been cataloged as a “contributing cause” of death.
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