People aged 60 and over will be offered COVID-19 booster shots this month, President López Obrador said Thursday.

“… We’re going to begin with third doses, or boosters, because we can’t talk about third shots when [some people] got one-dose vaccines,” he told reporters at his regular news conference.

“We’re going to start with seniors this month. The important thing is to point out that we have enough vaccines,” López Obrador said.

He said the government needed to act quickly because winter is coming.

López Obrador also said that Mexico is among the world’s top 10 countries in terms of the number of vaccines it has and thanked the United States for donating some 10 million shots, including 2.1 million that arrived Thursday.

“That’s why we’re going to continue helping, delivering vaccines to poor countries as we’ve been doing,” he said.

The president lamented that only six in 100 people in Africa are fully vaccinated and blamed the continent’s low vaccination rate for the emergence of the omicron variant.

“This is going to keep happening; that’s what the specialists say: there will be more mutations in the virus,” he said.

In other COVID-19 news:

• Reported COVID-19 cases declined 44% in November compared to October, while COVID-19 deaths fell 46%. A total of 80,662 cases were reported last month for a daily average of 2,689. COVID fatalities totaled 5,881 in November for an average of 196 per day.

• The Health Ministry reported 3,345 new cases and 182 deaths on Wednesday. Mexico’s accumulated tallies rose to 3.89 million confirmed infections and 294,428 deaths. Estimated active cases number 21,229.

• Health authorities have not detected any omicron cases in Mexico, while the first case of the variant was reported in the United States on Wednesday. The person who tested positive is fully vaccinated and recently returned to California from South Africa.

• More than 133.2 million vaccine doses have been administered in Mexico after just over 415,000 shots were given Wednesday. About 86% of adults are vaccinated, but the population-wide rate is only 60%, according to The New York Times vaccinations tracker.

Authorities in Mexico City began vaccinating youths aged 15 to 17 on Thursday. The government announced November 16 that it would offer shots to adolescents in that age bracket but hasn’t indicated it will vaccinate younger minors.

With reports from Milenio