Twenty-four medical associations in Mexico asked the government to vaccinate all health personnel against covid-19, including those who work in private hospitals, so they made the lists of their members available to the government to expedite the process.
In a letter addressed to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Secretary of Health, Jorge Alcocer Varela, and Secretary of Prevention and Health Promotion, Hugo López-Gatell, the directors and presidents of the associations expressed their concern about the increase in infections and deaths in the country in recent weeks, which has also affected health personnel.
The 24 associations, including the College of Critical Medicine, the College of Internal Medicine of Mexico, and the Mexican Association of Infectology and Clinical Microbiology, recalled that doctors who work in private institutions, as well as those who work in public hospitals, are in contact with covid patients, so they must receive immunization against the Sars-CoV2 virus.
All doctors, both in the public and private sectors, attend day by day to symptomatic and asymptomatic patients who have been infected by chronic degenerative diseases, accidents, and other diseases, regardless of the specialty required
"We recognize the difficulty in making the lists of priority groups for vaccination. Fulfilling our responsibility as a medical union, we offer the lists to members and associates from different medical and surgical areas so that health authorities have the ease of generating appointments for vaccination to all medical groups and all health personnel in the country ", they emphasized.
Although 466,708 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against covid-19 have been applied to health personnel in the country, the authorities have excluded personnel who work in private hospitals.
On January 14, the Undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion, Hugo López-Gatell, assured that the private institutions'' staff would be vaccinated. Still, it will be until they have a list of those who care for covid patients in the front line of battle, so he did not give an exact date of when they could receive the immunization.
Traducción: Valentina K.Yanes