The pharmaceutical company Serum Life Sciences Ltd., contracted to acquire the AstraZeneca vaccine, also doubled payments for 71 million 966,400 pesos. Despite the fact that these resources were later returned to Insabi, the ASF considered that there were “weaknesses in the control and supervision of the resources used in 2021 for the acquisition, reception, storage and distribution of vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus” .
The audit agency also detected that of the purchases of vaccines with five laboratories, there was partial information on the number of doses to be purchased and discrepancies in the data on the total doses, the batch numbers and the invoices of the vaccines that reached the Mexico.
The records of the vaccines stored in the Biological and Reactive Laboratories of Mexico (Birmex) did not indicate, in some cases, the temperature with which the doses were received, the lot number and number of vaccines delivered, the dates of receipt, of delivery and expiration, nor the signature of the public servant responsible for receiving the vaccines in the federal entities.
Without these data and without timely follow-up, The ASF reported that 1 million 631,610 doses of the covid-19 vaccines expired in March and April 2022 while they were still stored at the National Institute of Virology.
loss of life
Most of the people who have died from Covid-19 in Mexico were between the ages of 40 and 69. In the study Covid-19 in Mexico: a sociodemographic profilethe UNAM researcher Héctor Hernández Bringas pointed out that 94% of the deaths corresponded to manual and operational workers, housewives, retirees or pensioners and people without a job, who, despite the confinement, continued to use transport, public roads and going to markets to survive.
“Remote work is viable for people with higher incomes, but it is not for manual or operational workers or those who assume the role of household providers,” explained the academic from the Regional Center for Multidisciplinary Research.
Many people who died did have other preexisting conditions that complicated their prognosis, such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and smoking. However, underlines Dr. Gustavo Olaiz, the lax response of the federal government also had an influence.
“We had a very broad tolerance and that meant more cases and more deaths for Mexico,” he stresses.
