Mexico plans to close an agreement with Europe to produce vaccines and medicines this year

Mexico, the fifth country in the world with the most deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, hopes to close a contract with the European Commission (EC) before the end of the year for large pharmaceutical companies from the old continent to produce vaccines and medicines in its territory. An official told Reuters.

The idea, explained Iker Jiménez, general director of Global Economic Impulse at the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is to turn the country into the logistics center of Latin America and the Caribbean the region that accumulated the most deaths per capita from Covid-19, in the face of a possible next pandemic.

We are finishing closing the contract with the European Commission (EC) so that we can officially launch the project this year, November or December at the latest,” Jiménez said in an interview with Reuters on Monday afternoon.

“We don’t want the next pandemic, which could be tomorrow or 100 years from now, to catch us with our fingers in the door again,” he added.

The official in charge of attracting investment and international promotion of Mexico explained that the agreement would focus on producing and packaging vaccines and medicines.

Jiménez said it was forbidden to reveal the names of the companies. Still, Europe is home to many of the most important pharmaceutical companies, such as the British AstraZeneca, the German Bayer, the Belgian Janssen owned by Johnson & Johnson, Merck, the Swiss Novartis, and Roche, the French Sanofi, among others.

In the middle of the year, the head of the EC, the German Ursula von der Leyen, assured that the block wants to promote the production of vaccines and medicines in Latin America by investing more in the region and sharing technologies regulatory practices.