HONG KONG -- Hong Kong officials dropped a plan to mandate foreign domestic workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus, after hearing international criticism that the move would be discriminatory.
Most of Hong Kong's approximately 370,000 domestic workers come from Indonesia and the Philippines, both severely impacted by the pandemic.
Hong Kong officials initially proposed the mandate after a foreign domestic worker tested positive for a coronavirus variant in April, with an unknown source of infection. Another worker arriving from the Philippines had also tested positive for a variant.
Those findings prompted the city to order domestic workers to be tested for the virus at the end of April.
The plan for mandatory vaccinations was dropped after officials assessed public health needs and the potential legal issues, Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said at a regular news briefing Tuesday.
Teodoro Locsin Jr., the Philippines' secretary of foreign affairs, previously slammed the Hong Kong government for its mandatory vaccination plan for foreign domestic workers, saying that it "smacks of discrimination."
On Tuesday, Lam also announced a second round of mandatory tests for domestic workers as a precaution, which will begin on Saturday and last until the end of May.
She urged employers to allow the workers to take the test on a workday instead of on their day off.
Hong Kong has so far reported 11,812 infections of the coronavirus, with 210 deaths.
Indonesia has reported more than 1.7 million people infected and 47,000 deaths, while the Philippines has confirmed 1.1 million infections and 18,500 deaths from covid-19.
Separately, Mexican officials said Monday that problems producing second doses of Russia's Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine will likely mean they will be unable to supply enough to people who already got the first dose.
It's the latest account of production problems for Sputnik V, which the Russian government has been promising to other countries but has not been able to supply in sufficient quantities.
Sputnik is unusual among coronavirus vaccines in that the two doses are different and not interchangeable.
The Russian vaccine uses a modified version of the common cold-causing adenovirus to carry genes for the spike protein in the coronavirus as a way to prime the body to react if covid-19 comes along.
That is a similar technology to the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. But unlike AstraZeneca's two-dose vaccine, the Russian approach uses a slightly different adenovirus for the second booster shot.
Mexico's assistant health secretary, Hugo Lopez-Gatell, said the Russians have found that the first adenovirus grows much more quickly than the second.
Lopez-Gatell said Russian scientists are now suggesting abandoning the idea of giving the two separate Sputnik V shots several weeks apart and instead giving a second booster shot six months later.
"Over the course of months, the quantity of first doses they managed to produce got out of alignment with the quantity of second doses they were able to produce," Lopez-Gatell said.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund, Russia's sovereign wealth fund which has bankrolled Sputnik V and is in charge of marketing it abroad, denied the Mexican reports.
"The comments made by Mexican authorities regarding the production of the second dose of the Sputnik V vaccine are not true," the Fund's press office said in a statement. "The manufacturing of both components of Sputnik V is being upscaled in Russia and abroad to fully meet the rising demand for the vaccine internationally."
Mexico has so far received only 1.9 million Sputnik V doses, out of a total of 24 million it has signed a contract for. It has been forced to rely more on the Pfizer vaccine, of which it has received 10.6 million doses, as well as about 10 million doses of two Chinese vaccines. It also received about 4.6 million doses from AstraZeneca.
Mexico has recorded over 219,000 test-confirmed covid-19 deaths, but the country does so little testing that the government's own estimates of probable deaths now amounts to around 347,000.
