Kamala Harris will discuss sending 1.35 million COVID vaccine doses to Mexico in call with President Lopez Obrador today amid surge in infected migrants crossing border
Kamala Harris will talk with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Monday to discuss the U.S. sending more vaccines to the neighbors in the south.
'We're going to talk on Monday in order to keep working on our joint agenda of collaboration,' Lopez Obrador said during a speech over the weekend at a new national guard installation in Ciudad Juarez, a border city with Texas.
He did not provide any more details on other subjects he and the vice president will hit on during the Monday phone call but said he expects a shipment of 1.35 million vaccine doses from the U.S.
The leftist president, however, did appear to preview additional U.S. vaccine donations as the Delta variant surges in both the U.S. and Mexico.
'There are commitments for us to have more vaccines, provided by the United States government,' Lopez Obrador continued in his Sunday remarks.
He thanked Washington for an earlier vaccine donation of around 3.5 million doses.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said this weekend he will speak with Vice President Kamala Harris about the U.S. donating 1.35 million more vaccines to Mexico
The White House announced Friday that 50% of the entire U.S. population is now vaccinated against COVID-19
The seven-day rolling average of new COVID cases in the U.S. is 110,360 as of Sunday and in Mexico is upwards of 16,500.
The spike in Mexico is reaching numbers similar to their highest case rate at the height of the pandemic in January 2021.
Both the highly contagious Delta variant, first detected in India earlier this year, and the heightened number of breakthrough cases in the vaccinated are leading to the massive case spikes in the U.S. and Mexico.
The White House announced last week that 50 per cent of the total U.S. population is now fully inoculated against coronavirus.
Harris, a former senator from California, was tapped earlier this year by President Joe Biden to lead diplomatic efforts with Mexico and several Central American nations focusing on regional migration and economic development.
D.C. already sent around 3.5 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to Mexico. Here a shipment of Pfizer doses are unloaded in Mexico on December 23, 2020
While her role was quickly dubbed by outsiders as 'border czar', the White House has insisted she is focused on addressing 'root causes' of migration and not on the border crisis, which sees thousands of migrants arriving each day over the U.S.-Mexico border.
Lopez Obrador on Sunday praised U.S.-Mexico relations under Biden's six-month-old administration, describing them as based on 'respect for our sovereignty and development cooperation.'
Texas officials have also pleaded with the Biden administration to direct immigration agencies to stop releasing COVID-positive migrants into their communities after being apprehended at the border.
Some cities and towns have blamed an influx in coronavirus cases to the fact unvaccinated migrants are being sent to their communities as an Alternative to Detention Program after illegally crossing into the U.S.
The U.S. vaccination rate has plateaued as hesitant communities continue to refuse to get the jab
The infection rate has spiked to winter levels as the Delta variant surges and breakthrough cases in vaccinated people continue to emerge
The death rate, however, has not correlated with the massive spikes in cases