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Expressing our ‘Amistad’: Jaishankar as India delivers vaccines to Mexico
Sharing the news on Twitter, foreign minister S Jaishankar said, “Expressing our Amistad. Mexico receives Made in India vaccines.” Amistad refers to the ‘state of being friends’ or ‘a specific relation between two friends’.
Mexico on Sunday became the latest country to receive a consignment of the ‘Made in India’ coronavirus disease (Covid-19) vaccines. India delivered 870,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII), to Mexico on Sunday morning.
Sharing the news on Twitter, foreign minister S Jaishankar said, “Expressing our Amistad. Mexico receives Made in India vaccines.” Amistad refers to the ‘state of being friends’ or ‘a specific relation between two friends’.
Indian ambassador Manpreet Vohra had earlier said that huge efforts had been made by Jaishankar to deliver additional doses quickly upon Mexico’s special request.
“To meet #Mexico’s special request to #India for additional doses, huge efforts made by Minister @DrSJaishankar to help quickly. Now 870,000 Made-in-India vaccines will reach here on Sunday morning,” Vohra had tweeted.
Mexico has registered nearly 2 million coronavirus disease cases till now out of which 173,771 people have died and 1,542,991 have recovered, according to worldometers.info figures. The country’s death toll is third highest in the world after the United States and Brazil. Reports have suggested that due to an extremely low rate of testing, the actual toll of Mexico could be even more.
The country had started the drive to inoculate its citizens in late December last year. Mexico was the first country in Latin America to receive a shipment of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine by a courier aircraft from Belgium, as per a report by medicine news website Medical Xpress. However, its health ministry had earlier stated that only 766,350 doses of Pfizer had arrived, which was well short of the 34.4 million doses it was expecting to receive in weekly shipments by March, according to news agency ANI.
Meanwhile, apart from Mexico, India has also delivered vaccines to countries such as Canada, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh and Nepal among others. The Union ministry of external affairs had said on Friday that more than 22.9 million doses had been supplied to the global community.
