MEXICO CITY (AP) — Four out of every five people in Mexico who have received a flu shot so far this year have rejected government recommendations to receive a booster shot of a Russian or Cuban COVID-19 vaccine, authorities reported Tuesday .
Health Undersecretary Ruy López Ridaura attributed the high refusal rate to people’s reluctance to receive both vaccines at the same time.
However, some experts believe that some people simply don’t trust Russia’s Sputnik vaccine and Cuba’s Abdullah vaccine because both were designed in 2020 to target variants that were circulating at the time, not those that exist now.
“It’s an ancient antigen; it’s like if I got the 2020 flu vaccine,” said Andreu Comas, a professor of medicine at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosi. “There are currently no studies on the effectiveness of either vaccine against the (current) variants.”
In Mexico, those eligible for flu and COVID-19 vaccines are people over 60 and people with underlying health conditions, as they are considered high-risk groups. What is surprising is that these industries, which largely embraced coronavirus vaccinations in 2021 and 2022, are now rejecting them.
Mexico has purchased millions of doses of Russian and Cuban vaccines. The original plan was to administer about 20 million doses, but since the vaccination campaign began in mid-October, only about 1.9 million people, or 9.5% of those eligible, have agreed to be vaccinated.
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