By RICARDO CASTILLO Covid-19 Vaccines Politicized Ever since the Mexican government announcement on Friday, Jan. 15, that “the last batch” of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines — 219,375 vaccine units, to be exact, half the expected number of doses, would arrive in the country Tuesday, Jan. 19, the topic became a focus of a raging political debate. But at the root of that
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS Ever since it first opened its doors as a private hotel for a discerning public in 1957, Las Brisas, Acapulco’s premiere luxury resort destination, has always been about seclusion and indulgence. For decades, the likes of Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Connery, Ringo Starr and even John F. Kennedy would make unpublicized visits to the hotel’s exclusive
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS While World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned on Monday, Nov. 30, that “Mexico is in bad shape” with the covid-19 pandemic, and called for immediate government action to curb the surging cases, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his team seem to have missed the memo. “The number of increasing cases and
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Covid Vaccine Trials Mexico will soon launch phase 3 trials of the Canadian-Chinese covid-19 vaccine called CanSino Biologics developed by Janssen Labs, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. The vaccine trials will be held in Mexico City, the Pacific Coast states of Michoacán, Guerrero and Oaxaca, and the northern border states Coahuila and Nuevo León, accross from
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By THE PULSE NEWS MEXICO STAFF The global covid-19 death toll is fast approaching one million people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and that number could easily double even with the release of a viable vaccine. Unless there is “concerted international action,” the novel coronavirus contagion will continue to spread unabated, WHO Emergencies Director Mike Ryan warned over
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS While about 60 percent of all Mexicans now use face masks at least part of the time when they are away from their homes, less than 20 percent of those who do wear masks, wear them correctly. “The objective of wearing a face mask is to prevent tiny mucous particles from spreading when we talk, cough or
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Haphazard School Kickoff The school year in Mexico kicked off on Monday, Aug. 24, with all of the failures expected from a nation not accustomed to remote education. With classes at home, parents from all over the country complained first about the communications system failure as teachers responsible for their groups groped to find alternative education methods.
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XINHUA The total number of confirmed covid-19 cases in the Americas has crossed the 10 million mark, accounting for over half of the global tally, according to data released by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday, Aug. 7. As of 10 a.m. CET (0800 GMT) on Friday, 154,118 new covid-19 cases had been reported in the Americas during the
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS While many countries around the world are taking a go-it-alone, isolationist approach to dealing with the mounting international covid-19 pandemic, often resorting to finger-pointing blame games, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is instead adopting a let’s-work-together policy to confront the disease. The NAM — a forum of 120 developing world states that are not formally aligned with or
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XINHUA The epicenter of the covid-19 pandemic “is moving from Europe toward the Americas,” Cristian Morales Fuhrimann, representative of the Pan-American Health Organization and the World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) in Mexico, warned on Wednesday, April 22. The Americas have had “a bit more time to prepare for what is coming,” Morales Fuhrimann said via videoconference in Mexico City, noting the
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