How to Forget a Pandemic

As Covid-19 devastated Mexico, the government obscured the facts about cases, deaths, and vaccinations

- Nacha Cattan and Vernon Silver

Every weekday morning, Mexico’s president holds a rambling televised celebration of his supposed successes: a news conference with special guests, video clips, and slick graphics that often has the air of a variety show. Until mid- January one of the favored features was a giant graphic that showcased Mexico’s undisputed progress as the first Latin American nation to vaccinate its citizens against Covid-19. Then the data turned bad. Pfizer Inc., at the time Mexico’s only supplier of Covid shots, halved, then completely stopped, deliveries. Vaccinations remained unchanged for almost a month; deaths surged. The vaccine tracker got yanked from the show.

Mexican viewers didn’t know it from watching President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s daily discourse, but Mexico was becoming one of the world’s deadliest Covid hot spots. The government’s alternate version of reality included an undercounting of cases and deaths, something it belatedly acknowledged in March when it announced that Covid-related deaths were far higher than the official count, which stood at about 234,000 as of July 5. More expansive estimates can be derived from excess deaths, the epidemiological term for increased mortality compared with an average year. In one such analysis, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation places Mexico’s Covid deaths at about 540,000.