Mexico-US collaboration in science and innovation consolidates collective capacities: Hugo López-Gatell

The collaboration between Mexico and the United States in science, innovation, development, technology, and health has a long history that has consolidated collective capacities in the space of shared understanding, respect, and trust built with experience, highlighted by the undersecretary of Prevention and Promotion of the Health, Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez, during the opening of the Global Forum on Clinical Research.

At the meeting held in Mexico City, organized by the Mexican Clinical Research Network, López-Gatell Ramírez considered that there are areas of opportunity for the construction, development, continuity, and consolidation of clinical research on emerging infectious diseases. He reported that in Mexico, there is the Mexican Network of Clinical Research for emerging diseases that was born amid the influenza pandemic and has participated in the Mexican and American response to COVID-19 because it has taken advantage of opportunities to be at the forefront of new public health threats.

The head of the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risks (Cofepris), Alejandro Svarch Pérez, stressed that for the Health sector, regulatory certainty means compliance with the entire regulatory framework protection against health risks.

The strategy on this issue is intended to eliminate corruption, achieve administrative simplification without deregulation, and guarantee the supply of medicines under the principle that the market does not replace the State. “We are convinced that we will achieve the transformation of our country, going from being a manufacturing power to a space conducive to medical innovation.”

Through regulatory certainty, Cofepris pays the stewardship of the State over the Mexican public health system, with a fair balance between access to safe, effective, and quality medicines and the development of a competitive, honest, and responsible.

Opening the meeting, which brings together experts in Epidemiology from different countries, the United States ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, said that the control of public health threats “is on the right track” because there are experts in science and medicine who recognize that in the last 20 years the world has faced six pandemics, two of which —influenza and COVID-19— occurred in a span of 11 years, and there will be more.

He recognized the work carried out by Mexico with the application of sanitary measures against COVID-19, such as vaccination, correct use of face masks, frequent hand washing with soap and water, and healthy distance.

The White House Health Adviser, Antony Fauci, stated that one of the lessons left by the COVID-19 pandemic, more than two years after its appearance, is that the world must focus its efforts on scientific research to prevent future pandemics and other emerging infectious diseases.

“With 600 million cases, the COVID-19 pandemic is the most dramatic we have faced in 100 years, dating back to the 1918 influenza; where the lessons refer to increasingly effective vaccines, the result of the development of clinical studies and scientific contributions”, he pointed out.