¿Qué tan abiertos son los “datos abiertos” de vacunación en México?
Animal Político — El Contagio
How “open” are Mexico’s open vaccination data?
María Izquierdo — Sueño y presentimiento (1947) Colección particular · México A desolate landscape of dry trees, graves, and a red figure — the artist holds her own severed head, staging a dream of dread and premonition. Izquierdo was the first Mexican woman to exhibit in the United States, yet Rivera and Siqueiros publicly blocked her from painting a government mural in 1945, claiming a woman’s hands were not technically capable of the work. This canvas, painted two years later, feels like an answer.
Six months into Mexico’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign, formal transparency requests to both the Ministry of Health and SEDENA for disaggregated data — by sex, age, municipality, and manufacturer — were denied by both institutions. The op-ed argues that aggregate totals presented as “open data” substitute communication for transparency, removing the empirical foundation needed to evaluate whether the campaign is reaching the populations it was designed to protect.
The Problem
Six months into Mexico’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign, the federal government repeatedly claimed it was operating with “full transparency.” In daily 7 p.m. press briefings, officials projected slides showing the day’s dose count and the cumulative vaccination scheme; an interactive map displayed total doses by state. Government communications framed these artifacts as open data.
They are not. Open data, under Mexico’s General Transparency Law, must be free, comprehensive, accessible, and timely — and crucially, structured at a level of granularity that lets independent analysts use them. A daily press-conference slide and a state-level total are neither comprehensive nor accessible. They are aggregated communications outputs, not datasets.
The cost of that distinction is real: without disaggregated vaccination records, civil society and academia cannot evaluate equity, model impact, or hold the campaign to its own targets.
The Investigation
Together with Serendipia (Data Journalism), PADeCI (CIDE) filed formal information requests under Mexico’s transparency framework — directed to both the Ministry of Health and the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA), the two institutions running the vaccination logistics. The requests asked for what every serious epidemiological or policy analysis needs:
- Vaccinations disaggregated by sex
- Disaggregated by age group
- Disaggregated by municipality
- Disaggregated by vaccine manufacturer
These four dimensions are not exotic. They are the standard cuts used by every public health surveillance system that takes evaluation seriously. They are also the dimensions that determine whether a vaccination campaign is reaching the people it was designed to reach.
Two months passed. Both institutions refused.
- The Ministry of Health asserted that the records do not exist — even though the Undersecretary of Health, Hugo López-Gatell, had publicly stated on February 18, 2021 that municipal-level vaccination data existed and that the strategy operated under “full transparency.”
- SEDENA denied responsibility for documenting vaccine distribution logistics, despite running them.
Why It Matters
Without disaggregated vaccination data, four critical functions become impossible:
- Effectiveness evaluation. Knowing total doses tells us nothing about who received them. Equity analysis requires the breakdown.
- Epidemiological modeling. Mathematical models that estimate hospitalizations and deaths averted, optimal sequencing of priority groups, or geographic gaps need state-, municipality-, and age-level inputs. Aggregate totals cannot drive them.
- Logistics assessment. Distribution capacity, cold-chain performance, and waste cannot be evaluated from a press-conference slide.
- Vulnerability targeting. Identifying communities that have been left behind — by indigenous status, rurality, or marginalization — requires the underlying records, not the aggregate count.
The question is not whether Mexico had vaccination data — clearly it did. The question is whether citizens, researchers, and journalists have a right to access it in a usable form. Under the General Transparency Law, they do. Open data is a citizen right, not an administrative favor. When a government presents press-conference slides as “open data,” it is substituting communication for transparency — and in doing so, removes the empirical foundation that lets a public-health policy be evaluated, criticized, and improved.
Citation
Velázquez, S., Roa, J., Padilla, A., & Alarid-Escudero, F. (2021, June 23). ¿Qué tan abiertos son los “datos abiertos” de vacunación en México? Animal Político — El Contagio.