David Berrones News Today

Ana Sofía is radiologist at a state-run hospital in the Mexican city of Monterrey, not far from the Texas border. Her work often brings her into close contact with patients, but says she was denied a coronavirus vaccination as her superiors did not consider her to be a frontline worker. In despair, she attended a rural vaccination event for the elderly and asked for a leftover dose of the Sinovac jab – but she was again rebuffed, this time by...

Amlo’s response to the pandemic has confounded public health experts. According to the University of Washington, Mexico’s death toll is more than 600,000 – nearly triple the official figure. Yet the country has spent less than 1% of GDP on its response. Elements of the vaccination campaign have also caused controversy. The government has used the military to distribute vaccines, excluding the private sector, which has played a central role in other countries. Chaotic scenes have ...

The Mexican government designated public hospitals as the official COVID-19 treatment facilities since early in the pandemic, but private health care providers have also become important front-line workers, said Dr. Malaquías López-Cervantes, a former federal health official and a public health professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Mexican political leaders are disregarding recommendations from the World Health Organization and their own scientists, López-Cervantes said....

Thousands of medical workers left behind in Mexico’s vaccine rollout By Jorge Valencia © Ginnette Riquelme/AP A nurse shows an elderly man a syringe prepared with a dose of the Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine, before he is inoculated at the Americas Cultural Center in Ecatepec, Mexico, April 3, 2021. Dr. Maria José Diaz thought she’d be among the first to get a shot. So, as she and her secretary strapped on N95 masks and goggles for work every day, Diaz figured they would soon ...

Across the globe, there is consensus: health-care workers get vaccinated first. Nowhere other than Mexico have so many health workers died during the pandemic. And now many say they are being passed over for inoculation and are protesting by blocking main roads and the president’s national palace. “They need to wait,” said President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador during his morning press conference on Friday. “We’ll all get the shot.” Lopez Obrador and the virus czar Hugo Lopez-Gatell ...

By Cassandra Garrison MEXICO CITY, April 7 (Reuters) - Mexicos private healthcare personnel are protesting being left out of the governments COVID-19 vaccine rollout, just as the country braces for a potential third wave of infections. Angered by what they see as discrimination by a government prioritizing the public sector, hundreds of health workers that had gathered outside a medical school last week hoping to get inoculated ended up chanting "we want the vaccine." About 500 of the protester...

About 500 of the protesters eventually got their wish that day. “We realized we weren’t even considered,” said David Berrones, a Mexico City ophthalmologist who last month launched an informal census of medical professionals awaiting a jab. The government said it did include private front-line healthcare workers in its initial vaccination plans, but that efforts to reach all of them were complicated by unreliable staff registers. Mexico’s doctors have paid a heavy price in the crisis. A...