A program to aid the economy brings Mexican workers into San Diego for vaccinations.
TIJUANA — On a recent morning, hundreds of Mexican workers from the factories here, known as maquiladoras, were waved across the border into San Diego, without visas or passports, and rolled up their sleeves to be vaccinated against Covid-19. An hour later, they were back on production lines in Tijuana.
The goal was to protect not just the workers, but also the intertwined U.S. and Mexican economies.
“If the maquiladoras can’t operate, then we don’t get our Coca-Cola,” said Lydia Ikeda, the senior director of Covid operations at the University California San Diego Health, which is helping run the program. “We cannot be isolated.”
The cross-border vaccination effort is meant to remedy the kind of disparity in access to the vaccine that economists have warned could keep a robust global economic rebound out of reach.
The Biden administration has pledged to send 80 million doses to other nations, including four million for Mexico.
Along the U.S.-Mexico border, however, a pandemic border closure and a dearth of vaccines in Mexico have threatened to keep local economic recovery at bay. And officials from both nations have found a way to share surplus vaccines from Texas and California with Mexicans on the other side.
“We are divided by a virtual line,” Dr. Ikeda said, gesturing to the border. “To get them vaccinated is the only way for us to get out of the pandemic.”
The idea of vaccinating workers just across the border occurred to Carlos González Gutiérrez, Mexico’s consul general in San Diego, when he watched as college students and undo ented workers plucking berries in California’s fields received the vaccines with relative ease while Mexico struggled to provide them for its older people.
Mr. González reached out to San Diego County officials, who had seen the closure of the border in March 2020 damage the region’s once-thriving economy, with a proposal: Why not give excess vaccines nearing expiration to the thousands of Mexicans factory workers just across the border?
Soon, Mexican and U.S. officials agreed that San Diego’s excess vaccines, all Johnson & Johnson, would be sold to American companies with factories in Mexico. By May, San Diego County had received permission from the federal government — which owns the vaccines — to sell the shots, and worked with the Department of Homeland Security to allow Mexicans without visas to cross the border to receive them.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07...ariant-vaccine
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