Mexico approves Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine; fifth country to do so

Mexico's health regulator on Friday granted emergency authorization to the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, deputy health minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell said.

"Mexico is the fourth country whose health regulatory agency, Cofepris, has granted emergency use authorization to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine," he told a news conference.

In fact, Britain, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have already given the vaccine emergency approval, making Mexico the fifth country to do so.

The Mexican government announced this week that it would begin vaccinations against the coronavirus at the end of December, with a first batch of 250,000 doses to immunize 125,000 people, since the vaccine requires two shots.

But to start the program required approval of the drug by Cofepris, the regulatory agency.

Priority will go to medical staff battling on the front lines of the pandemic, and doses will be administered only in Mexico City and in the northern state of Coahuila, due to the specialist deep freeze and logistics requirements of the vaccine.

Mexico signed an agreement to purchase 34.4 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine. After the initial round of vaccinations, it hopes to reach a rate of one million a month between January and March, and 12 million in April, the government said.

Mexico also has preliminary purchase agreements with the Chinese-Canadian project CanSinoBio for 35 million doses of its vaccine candidate, and with the British firm AstraZeneca for 77.4 million doses of its candidate.

It is also part of the international Covax mechanism, which allows it to buy another 51.6 million doses.

With more than 113,000 deaths and 1.22 million cases of Covid-19 as of Friday, Mexico -- a country of 128 million people -- is the fourth worst-hit country in the world.