Mexico launches vaccination registration website to disastrous results

Mexico is running out of coronavirus vaccines, and the government doesn't expect to get any more until the middle of February.

So far, the country has received about 760,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. There are around 89,000 left, but most of those have been set aside to give as second doses. Additional Pfizer and Russian Sputnik vaccines are expected to start arriving in Mexico later this month, but there won't be enough to finish inoculating Mexico's 750,000 frontline health workers, The Associated Press reports.

On Tuesday, the government launched a website for people to register for vaccines, but due to overwhelming demand, the servers crashed. Hectór de Mauleón, a columnist for the newspaper El Universal, said he spent 20 hours trying to get registered. In a column, he criticized authorities, saying, "They had months to prepare for the demand that would happen, but as always, they didn't do it."

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As Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador recovers from COVID-19, the country is being led by Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero. On Thursday, she said the website was overloaded due to "the great hopes of getting registered for a vaccine," but this "of course will not affect the vaccination." As of late Thursday, authorities said about 500,000 people have been able to register.

Mexico recorded 1,682 COVID-19 deaths Thursday, bringing the total death toll up to 162,922. Officials also revealed that there are five known cases in the country involving the highly transmissible coronavirus variant first detected in the United Kingdom.