233,152 Mexican health workers have contracted Covid-19 and 3,699 have died because of it. According to the government data, Mexico has the highest death count for health care workers in the world. Many health care workers are blocking main roads to the president’s national palace because he is refusing to give the frontline workers vaccines. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said in a speech that the people getting the vaccines are strictly the ones working with coronavirus cases. Miguel Mata, who heads an association of 15 ambulance providers said not a single paramedic in his group has gotten the vaccine. The country’s vaccine rollout in December did start with frontline health workers. But the government quickly jumped to the elderly and teachers. The World Health Organization says, “Frontline line workers play a critical role, working under intense and challenging conditions, putting not only themselves but also potentially their households at higher risk for the sake of others. Last month, Mexico became the third country in the world to pass 200,000 Covid deaths. The president has resisted mandatory lockdowns and has largely pressed forward with the same priorities he had before the outbreak. Mexico has given 11.4 million shots. About 900,000 of those have gone to health care workers.
The idea of vaccinating teachers and elderly people first is obscured. The health care workers have been putting their lives on the line this past year and 1/4 in order to take care of the sick and prevent the death number from rising. The presidents idea of rolling out these vaccines was poor and the World Health Organization should have done something in order to help rollout the vaccines better. Without the vaccine these healthcare workers could be bringing the virus back to their loved ones and could lead to an outbreak within their household. For the region is really has no effect it just shows how poorly the president cares about his healthcare workers. It will have a lasting impact because health care workers will remember this and when the time comes if a virus were to outbreak again they may not take it as serious.
From a level of analysis perspective an individual front line worker could contract covid and bring it back to his or her family. On a state level the death toll is rising for frontline workers because the president is not prioritizing the people who are directly dealing with the cases. On a regional level the people who could be possible contagious could spread it to neighboring countries increasing the chances of people dying there. On a global scale countries could see the way Mexico handled the distribution of the virus and the rollout of the vaccine and could use their idea of vaccinating teachers and elderly first.