Discrimination On Their Own Soil
The identification requirement to get a COVID-19 vaccine discriminates against thousands of Mexican minors who were not registered at birth and are therefore non-existent to Mexican authorities. However, nonprofits like El Caracol are making their vaccination possible, as in the case of these children. September 14, 2022. Photo courtesy of El Caracol A.C.’s photo gallery
Mexico does not guarantee access to COVID-19 vaccines to children born in the country who do not have identity documents
Editor’s note: For a version of this story in Spanish click here.
Words by Alice Pipitone, @alicepipitone. Translation by Nathalie Alonso, @Nathalie_Writes.
On a Thursday during the summer of 2022, Mariela García woke up earlier than usual. She had to prepare a basket of the 200 potato and bean tacos that her husband sold daily on his bicycle. Her two daughters were scheduled to receive their first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine in Mexico City that day. Members of El Caracol A.C., a civil society organization that supports vulnerable families, were to escort them to ensure they would not be denied the immunization, which, in Mexico, is administered exclusively by civil and military authorities.
The fear that they would be denied the vaccine stems from the fact that Mariela’s daughters, Ana and Paola, ages 8 and 9, do not meet the requirement that Mexican health authorities established for COVID-19 immunization: having a Unique Population Registry Code (CURP in Spanish), which is an individual alphanumeric code assigned to each Mexican citizen registered in the Civil Registry with a birth certificate.
The public hospitals where Ana and Paola were born did not report their births to the Civil Registry, leaving the task in the hands of her mother, Mariela, a loving and intelligent woman who finds herself in poverty and illiterate. The case of the sisters is not out of the ordinary: six out of every 10 people who are not registered in Mexico are children and adolescents, according to United Nations Children 's Fund (UNICEF) estimates.
In 2017, during a period when Mariela, her husband, and her daughters lived on the streets of Mexico City, capital police undertook one of their routine operations to clear homeless people from city streets. A garbage truck made off with everything in those settlements, including the few documents Mariela had: her birth certificate and the hospital records of her two children. UNICEF itself acknowledges that the difficulties of gathering the required documents, getting to a civil registry office, and the costs involved with the processes, are among the barriers that Mexican people face when it comes to getting a CURP, the only way to exercise the human right to legal identity .
Mariela and her daughters, Ana and Paola, the day Ana received the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Mexico City. August 4, 2022. Photo by Alice Pipitone
“Your time has come!” Mexico’s health ministry declared on an online portal created for registrations and subsequent access to the vaccine against COVID-19. On June 16, 2021, registration began for children between the ages of 5 and 11, and the first requirement listed, for them and the rest of the population, was to have an assigned CURP.
In April 2022, Mexico’s Secretary of Health, Jorge Alcocer, authorized an update to the governing document, “National Vaccination Policy Against the Sars-Cov-2 Virus.” This document establishes that a lack of identity documents will not be an obstacle to getting vaccinated, and that priority would be given to “criteria for self-identification” and/or “temporary codes with the characteristics of the CURP” would be issued. The temporary codes were indeed put into practice, but the health ministry doesn’t promote this option to those who would benefit from it.
“The vaccine policy in Mexico has been a disaster from the start,” Jaime Sepúlveda Amor told palabra. Sepúlveda Amor is the executive director of the Institute for Global Health Science at the University of California at San Francisco and served for more than two decades as the leader of some of the top epidemiology and health public health institutions in Mexico. “That children are being denied because they don’t have identifying documents angers and moves me.”
The CURP requirement also discriminates against the families of undocumented immigrants living in the country. The document referenced that governs the vaccination policy says that, “migrant individuals without papers will be able to access the vaccine without endangering their ability to stay in the country,” but does not say how these people would access the vaccine. Vaccination sites turn away immigrants, including children and minors, without identity documents, despite the fact that the federal health ministry assured palabra that the COVID-19 vaccine “is universal and accessible by anyone on Mexican soil.”
Mariela’s marathon
Mariela’s husband lost his job in 2020 as a result of the pandemic, which resulted in the family falling behind on two rent payments and being evicted. At that time, he sold used clothes in a traveling market. With the obligatory quarantine, sales dropped and his employer fired him. The family lived on the streets for a year in Mexico City’s historic center until the beginning of 2022, when a team at El Caracol found them a room on the rooftop of a building and covered the first few months of rent.
In the months that followed, the couple covered costs by selling tacos de canasta, which get their name because the tacos are kept in a basket to keep warm as they are transported on bicycles to be sold in public spaces. She cooked using a pot propped up by bricks, using cans of industrial grade alcohol, and he sold them. They put together the bicycle by buying one part at a time with the money they made cleaning windshields at traffic stops and selling bottles of PET and aluminum.
In addition to the support that El Caracol offers to families like Mariela’s, this nonprofit has worked to inform, promote, and ultimately get the population to vaccination sites. On August 4, 2022, Mariela and her daughters arrived on time to an appointment at the headquarters of the organization, along with 17 other children who were also experiencing unstable housing, to be inoculated. Around noon, the team transported the children in two vans to one of the clinics where the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is administered to children between the ages of 5 and 11.
Children prior to receiving COVID-19 vaccinations administered by the National Navy in Mexico City. Among them, Paola, Mariela’s oldest daughter. September 23, 2022. Photo courtesy of El Caracol A.C’s photo gallery
By coincidence, a federal government official was on-site. When she learned that the children in line — with their hair brushed and their clothing impeccable (the organization advises being mindful of personal appearance, which is often an excuse for discrimination) — were a vulnerable population, she immediately offered to help: “Wait. I’m going to fight with my boss!” she said. After several phone calls, the woman returned with a temporary numeric code to use in place of the CURP. palabra made a public information request to various federal and local authorities regarding that temporary CURP, but they claimed to not know what it was.
The main obstacle had been overcome, but only one girl — the younger of Mariela’s daughters —and another boy were able to get vaccines, because that week the vaccine was only available for children who were 8 years of age. The good relationship between El Caracol and the clinic didn’t help, nor did the organization’s attempts to explain how difficult it is to gather and transport this population, the children of informal workers who depend on their income to eat and sleep with a roof over their heads.
The immunization of 10 of the 17 children that made their first attempt — 41 days prior — took place on September 14, thanks to the relationships El Caracol has built over the last three decades with public officials at various institutions and the intercession of the Council to Prevent and Eliminate Discrimination in Mexico City (COPRED). Personnel from the country’s Navy Ministry (SEMAR) provided and administered the vaccines to minors, without the need for them to present any documents, and a third date of appointments was made available. On September 23, Paola, Mariela’s oldest daughter, was vaccinated along with nine other children between the ages of 5 and 12.
All in the same boat
“I could not vaccinate my child in Mexico; they insisted that without a CURP it was impossible.”
Doris, an infectious disease specialist at a public hospital in Mexico City — who asked that her name be changed to protect her privacy — had to vaccinate her son in the U.S. because the process to receive a CURP was “incredibly long.” The child’s birth certificate, from the U.S., clearly established that he is the son of Mexican parents, but this document was not enough and in-person classes would be starting soon. In the U.S., all Doris had to do was make an appointment at a pharmacy and show her son’s identification.
In the U.S., the vaccine is free, regardless of whether an individual has a Social Security Number and/or health insurance, as established by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act; President Joe Biden’s administration instructed vaccination sites not to deny immunization to undocumented immigrants. Nonetheless, in practice, universal vaccine access is not always guaranteed.
Vaccinations at the Maryland headquarters of CASA, an organization that assists and advocates for immigrants in the U.S. March 26, 2021 in Langley Park, where 83% of the population is Hispanic. Photo courtesy of CASA
A 2021 Kaiser Family Foundation survey revealed that 33% of Hispanic adults in the U.S. who are not vaccinated want to be immunized, but they are afraid to hurt their own immigration status or that of their relatives, they have a hard time traveling, or they can’t miss work because of possible vaccine side effects. The survey also notes that Hispanic populations have been asked for documents that are not required at vaccination sites: 56% of those who received the vaccine were asked to present government-issued identification and 15% were asked for a Social Security Number.
As is the case in Mexico, vulnerable populations in the United States have sought out the help of nonprofits and grassroots organizations to get vaccinated. “We have administered vaccines to some 20,000 people in our facilities,” says Michelle LaRue, director of the health program at CASA Maryland, a nonprofit that supports Hispanics in the U.S. “They feel safe with us.”
In the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, countries like Cuba, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela, among others, are already administering the COVID-19 vaccine to children six months or older, with the minimum age depending on the country — although the disparity in the percentage of the population vaccination from one country to the next ranges from less than 2% in Haiti to more than 90% in Chile. But there are at least 3.2 million children under the age of 5 who have never been registered. Of these children, 78% are located in Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Haiti, according to UNICEF estimates.
Joseph Ralph Midy, regional immunization advisor to UNICEF for Latin America and the Caribbean, issues a reminder that “a child should never be denied a COVID vaccine, or any other vaccine, due to a lack of identity documents,” because this is a violation of their right to access healthcare services. And at least 15 of the 18 countries in the region that are immunizing children against COVID-19 require identity documents for minors in order to vaccinate them, according to information published on the respective government portals.
A child is inoculated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by a member of the Mexican Navy, in southern Mexico City. September 14, 2022. Photo courtesy of the El Caracol A.C. photo gallery
Fifa A. Rahman, who co-authored the Matahari Global report “Mapping COVID-19 Access Gaps: Results From 14 Countries and Territories,” asserts that the global response to COVID-19 “has been racist. People in countries with medium-to-low income levels have been abandoned.” Rahman adds that the low rates of vaccination have been attributed to a fear of the vaccine, but she notes that is false. “Residents of the global south have encountered a lack of vaccine supply, low investments in healthcare systems, and poor adaptation to local needs,” she explains.
The numbers bear that out: 67.9% of the world population has received less than one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, but in low-income countries, the percentage is 22.5%, according to estimates calculated by the organization Global Change Data. Despite the international regulations, vaccine access has become a privilege.
That is clear to people like Mariela who, even though her daughters were fearful of the injection, convinced them that they had to get vaccinated because, “it is a big opportunity.”
She might not have great wealth, but she’s at peace knowing that, “the day I die, at least my daughters will be healthy.”
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Alice Pipitone is a freelance investigative journalist in Mexico, where she has contributed to radio, digital and print media. In Washington, D.C., she contributed to Newsweek in Spanish. And, in Colombia, she worked with the research unit of the economic magazine Dinero.