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Mexico cheers US border opening, frets over WHO vaccine rules

(Reuters) (The Jakarta Post)
Mexico City
Fri, October 15, 2021

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Mexico cheers US border opening, frets over WHO vaccine rules

M

exico's president on Wednesday hailed a United States decision to open their shared border in November after more than 18 months of pandemic restrictions, though millions of Mexicans inoculated with Chinese and Russian vaccines face being shut out.

The world's busiest land border, where nearly a million people crossed each day before the coronavirus pandemic broke out, has been closed to non-essential travel since March 2020.

"The opening of the northern border has been achieved, we are going to have normality," President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told his daily morning news conference.

Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard added the US would determine the exact date, but that it would be in early November.

With the United States planning to permit entry only to visitors inoculated with vaccines authorized by the World Health Organization (WHO), Lopez Obrador urged WHO to approve all other COVID-19 vaccines in public use.

"The WHO must act correctly, without political or ideological tendencies, sticking to the science," Lopez Obrador said, in reference to slower certification for Russian and some Chinese vaccines.

The closure of the 1,954-mile (3,144-kilometer) border dealt a blow to businesses on both side of the frontier.

In Texas border counties alone, the loss of Mexican shoppers and visitors caused around US$4.9 billion in lost GDP in 2020, a report by the Baker Institute calculated.

More than 950,000 people entered the US from Mexico on foot or in cars on a typical day, according to 2019 US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency data.

 

Vaccinated again

US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier said US borders with Canada and Mexico would reopen in November for fully vaccinated travelers.

US officials last week said international visitors will need to be inoculated with US or WHO-authorized vaccines.

This poses a problem for Mexico, which has inoculated millions of people with Russia's Sputnik V and China's Cansino — neither of which is WHO-approved.

Mexico has signed agreements for Sputnik to inoculate another 12 million people, and Cansino, another 35 million people, according to the foreign ministry.

Sergio Flores, who lives in the northern border state of Baja California and often crosses into the US with his family, said he first got the Cansino jab because it was the only option.

Then he saw rumors on social media that he would not be able to cross the border with the Chinese formula and went to the US to look for an alternative.

"I went to get the other one, Pfizer, it was the first thing that came to mind," he said.

Ebrard said the border reopening will coincide with a push to reactivate economic activities in the frontier region, where Mexico has strived to bring vaccination rates in line with the US.

He said high-level bilateral economic meetings in November will focus on the border area, and other meetings in the coming days will work out details of the reopening.

Mexico had been strongly pushing Washington for the reopening, including laying out proposals during a visit by US Vice President Kamala Harris, Ebrard added.

The US "accepted many proposals that we made along the way to achieve this", Ebrard said, without giving details.

In a separate development, Ebrard said that the US needs to invest more heavily in Central America if it hopes to slow record levels of northbound migration.

"There needs to be a bigger investment from the United States in Central America than has been given, without a doubt," Ebrard told a Mexican radio program when asked about the prospect of Mexico acting as a barrier for migrants.

"Without this investment, if the United States does not support Central America, it's very hard to think that the migration flows that are happening will diminish," he added.

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