Mexico creates vaccine oasis in bid to reopen U.S. border
The state of Baja California is Mexico’s COVID-19 vaccination beachhead, an island of safety better protected than California itself, just a few hundred tantalizing yards away.
As President Andrés Manuel López Obrador rushes to revive his battered economy, Mexico is prioritizing scant vaccines for border states, trying to inoculate all adults there. In Baja California, home to Tijuana, 79 percent of residents 18 or over have been vaccinated with at least one shot, Mexico says. In California, that rate is 62 percent, according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker.
Efforts to vaccinate all adults along the U.S.-Mexico border would set up the countries for a “complete reopening of the border,” López Obrador said at a news briefing Thursday. He said last week that the government will focus on 39 municipalities.
Mexico is hoping that success at its busiest border crossing with the U.S. will persuade its northern neighbor to admit nonessential travelers, even if only one city at a time. The decision about where to send doses isn’t easy. The nation has fully vaccinated only 16 percent of its population versus 47 percent in the U.S., and the threat of more transmissible variants is growing across the region.
“If the objective is to reactivate the economy, it makes sense,” said Fernando Alarid-Escudero, a researcher at Mexico’s CIDE University who has worked on COVID-19 models. “There’s always a trade-off. It could mean we’ll vaccinate less in the south of the country, which is also touristic, and where there can be new outbreaks.”
Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodriguez said at Thursday’s briefing in Mexico City that she expects the border inoculation program will be done within a month. López Obrador said that on a recent visit to Baja California, San Diego officials liked the idea of reopening the part of the border they share, but that the decision depends on the U.S. federal government.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Thursday that the Biden administration isn’t ready to lift restrictions on international travel.
“It has to be based on conditions,” Buttigieg said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, noting the U.S. has working groups with the U.K., the European Union, Canada and Mexico to determine when it will be appropriate.
López Obrador’s border gamble is taking place as Mexico enters a crucial phase. Health officials are trying to outrace the virus with vaccinations, but they are in short supply. Chiapas, for example, Mexico’s poorest state, also has the lowest vaccination rate: 18 percent for a single dose.
The inoculation campaign began slowly but now averages over 400,000 daily doses compared with 1 million in the U.S., a country with more than twice its population.
Mexico had a stockpile of about 60 million doses as of July 4, while manufacturers pledged 700 million for the U.S. by the end of the month. Mexico also faces logistical problems of getting shots to remote areas, many of which historically don’t accept immunization, according to Alarid-Escudero.
Shortages even threaten the border campaign itself: Pfizer Inc. said it will reduce shipments to Mexico for three weeks. That’s led López Obrador to delay inoculating the next big border city, Juarez, for at least 15 days.
Meanwhile, states like Baja’s neighbor, Baja California Sur, are seeing a summer hospitalization surge. Nationally, new Mexico cases reached their highest since February on each of the past three days.