Photo: Steven Cornfield/Unsplash

By MARK LORENZANA

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced the acquisition of the bivalent vaccine booster produced by Pfizer-BioNTech against the Omicron variant, as well as the original strain, of the covid-19 virus. Medical experts in Mexico, however, are not too optimistic about the shots arriving in the country anytime soon.

“At least in the short term, it won’t reach our shores,” Alejandro Macías, former National Commissioner for the Prevention and Control of A/H1N1 Influenza, said. “We have ordered and bought a lot of original doses of the covid-19 vaccine, and we have yet to apply them.”

More than 5 million unused vaccines in the country have even expired. On Saturday, Sept. 25, Mexico’s Federal Secretariat of Public Health (SSA), in an official statement, acknowledged that 5.4 million covid-19 vaccines had expired and are set to be thrown away.

Mexican health authorities have already issued a statement that, starting September of next year, a booster vaccine will be offered to those over 50 years of age, and to people who are at a higher risk of developing serious illness from the covid-19 virus.

A bivalent vaccine is a type of vaccine that protects against a combination of two or more coronavirus strains. It aims to create a broader immune response and improves the strength and duration of protection against the most dominant COVID-19 variants in circulation worldwide, which is currently the Omicron variant.