Today, the Chief of the Private Office of the Foreign Ministry, Guillermo Justo Chaves, received Mexico’s Director General of American Regional Organizations and Mechanisms of the Foreign Ministry, Efraín Guadarrama Pérez, to discuss the state of relations between both countries, the situation of the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Sputnik V vaccines, and the common agenda within the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
Guadarrama Pérez, a close advisor to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is in Argentina as part of the delegation headed by the Undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion of Mexico, Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez. They both met with President Alberto Fernandez on Thursday 7.
Chaves, Undersecretary for Issues of the Americas Juan Valle, and the Mexican official highlighted the close ties between both countries in CELAC since Mexico assumed the Pro Tempore Presidency. Guadarrama Pérez is Mexico’s National Coordinator for CELAC. Mexico has also been elected to hold the Pro Tempore Presidency for 2021 with the support of Argentina, among other countries.
It was within this context that Foreign Minister Felipe Solá, together with his Mexican counterpart, Marcelo Ebrard, promoted the regional framework for one of the vaccines against the coronavirus—the one developed by Oxford University and the company AstraZeneca in the United Kingdom. The active ingredient of the vaccine is produced by the Argentine laboratory mAbxience. The production process will be completed in a few days by LiomontLab in Mexico.
Within the context of CELAC, Solá and Ebrard put forward a proposal, which was accepted, to distribute the initial production of an estimated 210 million doses not only in Argentina and Mexico, but also in other Latin American and Caribbean countries at an affordable price in order to guarantee the principle of solidarity in healthcare.
Chaves and Guadarrama Pérez also reviewed the situation in the region.
