In Mexico, more than 400 scientists, academics and others signed on to a letter directed at the country’s president this week, with recommendations for his pandemic response.
The letter to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador urges him to consider seven recommendations for handling the pandemic, including a mask mandate on all federal and state owned property.
It also calls for the temporary suspension of government “mega-projects,” like a new refinery in Tabasco, airport in Mexico City or the Mayan Train project. The authors suggest reallocating those funds to buy more COVID-19 vaccines, and to support scientific research and innovation that would allow Mexico to produce its own vaccines and otherwise prepare for what the letter calls “other pandemics that will undoubtedly appear in the future.”
"The only big project should be saving the lives of Mexico's inhabitants, buying, administering, producing and mass distribution of COVID-19 vaccines," the letter concludes.
Thousands more people have signed on to the letter since it was published by Propuestas Para Mexico earlier Monday, the same day López Obrador returned to work after having contracted the coronavirus himself. He did not wear a mask.
