Mexico City – Mexico is waiving an upcoming shipment of Covid-19 vaccines from India, which is in the throes of a brutal coronavirus second wave, as “a way of expressing our solidarity,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said.
India supplied Mexico in February with some 870,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab made in India and had been due to deliver another consignment of the same size, “but we told them we don’t need them, that we understand what they’re going through,” the president told his daily news conference, calling it a way that Mexico can support “even with the limitations we have”.
Mexico, which has one of the world’s highest Covid-19 excess deaths tallies, sent Marcelo Ebrard, foreign minister, to Russia on Sunday night to discuss plans for Mexico to bottle the Sputnik V vaccine. Ebrard has also announced plans to visit India and China on a quest to secure vaccine supplies.
Landsteiner Scientific, a Mexican laboratory with international sales, also has the Russian jab in its sights.
“It’s a travesty for the developing world to be beholden to the big multinationals [for vaccines],” said Robert Russell, Landsteiner’s senior vice-president of international business.
Landsteiner has been in talks with the Russian Direct Investment Fund since last August about local production of the vaccine. “It would be beneficial to be able to have a facility in Mexico to be able to handle Mexico’s requirement and beyond,” Russell told the FT.
As a private company, he said Landsteiner would not give a figure for potential investment but noted that it had land and facilities to be able to locate a production plant and could scale up quickly. “We have the capacity to do 79m to 80m doses [fill and finish] in two weeks,” he said.