The Security Council is the only organ of the UN whose decisions of the Member States are binding.
Hence the enormous importance that the Secretary of Foreign Affairs Marcelo Ebrard is putting the issue of the distribution of vaccines against Covid-19 on the table.
In his first speech as a member of the Security Council, on January 6, he had already referred to the issue of health as an element that ensures peace.
After a year of settlement of the pandemic worldwide, the hope of vaccination is conditioned to production and logistics, but above all, to the purchasing power of the countries and the nationality of the pharmaceutical companies that produce doses against Covid- 19.
Now we realize that the blanket is not enough to cover everyone. Mexico is not the exception. In January we witnessed the tension between the European Union and the United Kingdom, and not only due to Brexit, which fortunately reached an agreed end where the community border begins in the limitation of Northern Ireland with the rest of the United Kingdom, allowing the validity of the Good Friday agreement between the two Irlandes, but for the Oxford AstraSeneca vaccine dispute.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has revealed that 10 countries concentrate 75% of vaccine doses, and the rest of the world we have to settle for 25 percent. Its CEO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has commented: “Vaccines against Covid-19 are being administered in 50 countries around the world, almost all of them rich nations.” This was said on January 27 during the debate on the practical considerations of the vaccine.
Foreign Minister Ebrard grabbed the gauntlet, and in accordance with the WHO, on February 17 he called for respecting resolution 74/274 of the UN General Assembly, which calls for strengthening supply chains to guarantee universal access of the vaccine. He did so as president of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
His words regarding the insufficient results of the Covax mechanism (Global Access Fund for Covid-19 vaccines promoted by the WHO, the European Commission and the government of France) are worrying, since it is the only multilateral instrument to guarantee universal access to the vaccine.
This week, Foreign Minister Ebrard illustrated during the joint press conference between the presidents of Mexico and Argentina, the little efficiency that the Covax mechanism has had, since so far it has not delivered “not a single vaccine.” He revealed that the government of Mexico signed a contract to acquire 51.5 million doses through Covax to vaccinate 25.75 million Mexicans.
It has become clear, after several waves of the pandemic, that the main objective of all countries in the health issue is the total vaccination of their respective populations.
Israel is a country that is far ahead of this goal: it is close to 50% of the population. On average, it has vaccinated 200,000 people per day. But in most nations the vaccine has not arrived.
Other governments have used the vaccine as part of their soft power to open multi-issue negotiations with various countries.
It has been a year since the WHO declared the pandemic and we still do not know with certainty how we will get out of the multiple crises.
An IMF study projects a worrisome scenario for the summer of 2022, at which time most of the global population is supposedly vaccinated. There would be unrest in many parts of the world due to the economic crisis that is already raging.
Hopefully the problem of vaccination is not the preamble.
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