Seeking to reach Hondurans in Miami, the mayor of a small island enclave tucked in Biscayne Bay invited people to come get a vaccine against COVID-19.
What he got instead: Inquiries from dozens of people in Honduras and across Latin America asking if they could come get the coveted shots and willing to change their plans to get on the next Miami-bound flight.
“I was surprised by the amount of people and their desperation to get vaccinated,” said Brent Latham, the mayor of North Bay Village, who issued the appeal in a May 10 social media post. “It’s just such a juxtaposition with the attitude that we’re seeing here in the United States, where so many people are not anxious to get vaccinated.”
The uneven vaccine rollout in many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean is fueling a budding vaccine tourism industry where the privileged with access to U.S. visas and money for airfare are flying thousands of miles to Miami, Houston and elsewhere to come get a jab in the arm.
Demand is so great that COVID-19 vaccine travel packages are popping up all across the region as tour companies in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Peru offer round-trip air travel with shuttle service to a vaccination site, hotel accommodations and even excursions like a shopping trip to Miami’s Dolphin Mall.
“There is a lot of demand for these vaccination programs,” said Henry Garzon, the manager of Viva Consolidadora Turistica, a travel agency with offices in Miami, Orlando and Bogota. “The flights are arriving full and the airfares have risen a lot due to the demand that currently exists.”
Earlier this month, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city will start providing visitors with one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccines in Times Square and other popular tourist spots through mobile vaccination sites to boost tourism. Alaska has also said it plans to do the same with Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. The tourism minister in the Maldives in South Asia has similarly announced plans to use vaccinations as a tourism draw.
In one of the world’s most unequal regions, the growing disparity between the haves and have-nots is extending to vaccines. And the have-nots are being left behind as cases surge and the global platform to get vaccines to low and middle-income countries faces a shortfall of 190 million doses, according to the United Nations.
Data analysis by The Miami Herald, el Nuevo Herald and the McClatchy Washington Bureau shows that only two countries in all of Latin America and the Caribbean — Chile and Uruguay — have more than 30% of their populations vaccinated with at least one dose. This excludes small European-linked territories in the Caribbean that began vaccination efforts before most of their neighbors.
“Vaccine tourism is not the solution but rather a symptom of how unequally vaccines are being distributed in the Americas,” said Dr. Carissa Etienne, the director of the World Health Organization’s Americas branch. “Vaccines can be the difference between life and death and should not be a privilege of wealthy countries or wealthy people.”
Etienne, an advocate throughout the pandemic of tackling inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean, said “ultimately vaccine tourism aggravates inequality.”
That’s not stopping those who can travel from Latin America from doing so in an effort to gain the peace of mind offered by the vaccines.
“I feel very thankful to the United States for protecting me and so many others,” said Andrea Maine, 52, who flew to Miami from Argentina for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in March.
Her 69-year-old husband with preexisting conditions flew to Miami in January to get his two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, taking advantage of a trip to visit family in the U.S. to get the shots and an office rental space that qualified him for residency.
Maine is angered by the fact that Argentina, a country with high levels of education and a strong medical tradition, lags so far on vaccinations and continues limiting flights to the United States, which would let more people get vaccinated.
“It’s sad that we have to go abroad,” said Maine, calling the coronavirus a matter of “life or death” for many Argentines, who are continuing to see high numbers of infections during an ongoing second wave.
Worried she might be accused of taking vaccines from Americans, Maine was surprised to find that when she arrived in Miami there were no questions asked, even though proof of residency was still required.
“There were lots of surplus vaccines,” she said.
Juan Lopez a Bogota-based executive at a pharmaceutical company, was vaccinated less than three hours after landing at Miami International Airport in late April.
At the time, Florida wasn’t yet allowing vaccination for non-residents, but Lopez who is in his 40s, was able to meet the state’s residency requirements; he has a local bank account.
To his surprise, that didn’t end up mattering. Staff at the Hard Rock Stadium vaccination site in north Miami-Dade didn’t ask to see more than his Colombian passport.
“At the end of the day, I took this decision for my family,” he said. “I live with my wife. We have a 9-year-old. What happens to him if either of us or both of us gets COVID? He’d be by himself.”
At the time Lopez decided to travel to Miami, Colombia was still vaccinating those 60 and older, even though it had started its vaccination rollout two months earlier. Last week, as intensive care unit occupancy rates soared to 95% amid a worrying third peak and mounting social unrest, the South American nation was still vaccinating Colombians in the same age group.
The lack of access to vaccines in Colombia and other Latin American countries, Lopez said, “generates in you a feeling of risk and fear.” But getting vaccinated in America, also stirs up feelings of guilt.
“I have cousins, uncles who don’t have an American visa, or they don’t have the means to spend thousands of dollars on tickets and hotels and food. That’s not a possibility for them and that rubs me the wrong way,” Lopez said. “That’s why I kept this trip hush-hush in my family, among my friends. Because at the end of the day, I feel happy for me, but sad for the rest. They will have to wait so much longer.”
But like Maine, the Argentine who traveled to Miami, Lopez feels he is also protecting his countrymen by traveling to get a vaccine.
“I’ll likely be helping lessen the burden on the health system. I won’t be needing hospitalizations, surgeries, intensive care. And I’ll be able to give my turn for vaccination to someone else,” he said.
Colombian Health Minister Fernando Ruiz Gomez acknowledged on May 14 that the vaccination program, which got off to a slow start, needed to be expanded in big cities and elsewhere if Colombia is to meet its goal of vaccinating 35 million citizens by the end of this year.
As of May 18, the country had a vaccination rate of 9% and had administered 7.3 million doses, of which 2.8 million people had received a second shot, according to the Heralds’ analysis of data from the health ministry.
“The government has not really handled this COVID crisis situation well,” said Garzon, the travel agent, who calls the crisis “unprecedented” and worries that the ongoing anti-government protests “will lead in the near future to more infections, and we are not prepared in Colombia to respond to such demand.”
The COVID-19 response in Mexico is equally vexing. Ostensibly it is supposed to be better equipped to handle the pandemic since it is part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, regarded as a “club for rich countries.”
Yet supply of COVID-19 vaccines is running dreadfully short in the country of about 128 million.
The country’s own production of the AstraZeneca vaccine is far behind schedule and it received less of the Russian Sputnik vaccine than anticipated. The country received just under 3 million vaccine doses from the United States and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on April 30 he expected another 5 million donated doses as Mexico struggles to get its own production ramped up.
Mexicans with the financial means aren’t waiting around. They’re booking trips to Texas, California and Nevada as part of the burgeoning vaccine tourism.
Antonio Hernandez and his wife Fabiola, a well-to-do couple in Mexico City, responded to an ad offering travel to the U.S. to get a vaccine sent by a friend. They followed instructions to communicate via WhatsApp and got a call back from a courteous woman who explained that for 1,000 pesos per person, about $50, they would be registered for a COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S. and would get a QR Code to present at the time of vaccination.
The hitch, however, is that they had to buy airline travel through the company from Mexico City to Los Angeles for about $1,200 per person. It all worked like clockwork and they were vaccinated at the Kedren Health building in Los Angeles, which offers free walk-in vaccinations.
Another company offering vaccine travel is the 101 Travel Club in Mexico, which offers trips to Las Vegas and the three Texas cities of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. It too charges about $50 for registering someone for a vaccine, on top of the travel costs.
When reached in late April, they had just added the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to their list of Pfizer and Moderna offerings. The travel agency promises to register clients for vaccines at popular U.S. private sector sites such as Walgreens, CVS, Costco, Walmart and the HEB grocery, an employee said.
There is no guarantee of a vaccine, just registration for one. The employee explained the agency has no control over factors such as a change in store hours, local criteria for vaccines or a person’s individual health status.
There are no waiting lists per se, the employee added, but the agency needs five or six days of lead time to secure an appointment in one of the four cities.
For Latham, the mayor of North Bay Village, it is a “cruel irony” that there is an oversupply of U.S. vaccines amid regional desperation. He has no ability to make international policy but what little sway he has involves tapping contacts on behalf of friends and elected officials in Honduras pleading for help in securing vaccines.
“I’ve heard stories of many, many dozens of individuals who have reached out to me, saying, ‘Can you do anything to help us get even small amounts of vaccines because we had a parent or grandparent die of COVID; people are getting sick and dying,” said Latham, who spent time in Honduras as a Peace Corps volunteer. “It seems right to me that if we have an oversupply, there should be some way we should be looking at, at getting it to the places close by that need it.”
(El Nuevo Herald Staff Writer Syra Ortiz-Blanes contributed to this report.)
