After the president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador lashed out at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for not sending its medical students to face COVID-19 during the pandemic and, instead, sending them home, the Highest House of Studies rejected this version.
Through a statement, UNAM detailed the activities in which the university supported the Federal Government in the strategy to combat the pandemic, including its contributions in terms of personnel in hospitals as well as the conversion of various university spaces into vaccination centers. .
“In relation to the activity of the students of the medical degrees and postgraduate students of medical specialties at UNAM, during the months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recently, the work of our students during the pandemic has been publicly questioned, suggesting that the National Autonomous University of Mexico prevented students, in their different academic degrees, from participating with the federal and local health authorities in the fight to overcome the health crisis that has claimed so many lives in our country. In this regard, it is pertinent to make some clarifications:
1.- It was the health authority that, on March 19, 2020, in its official letter DGCES.DG-037-2020, suspended all the activities of the undergraduate clinical cycles, requesting the directors of Hospitals and Health jurisdictions that students did not go to health institutions.
On that same date and according to the cited document, access to undergraduate interns in first and second level hospitals was also prevented. The University attended to these measures instructed by the health authority and for considering them pertinent to contain infections and protect health.
Undergraduate students have been gradually integrated, since the last quarter of 2021, into their hospital activities to the extent that the authorities of the health institutions have allowed it.
2.- Social service interns who were in hospital units were, on instructions from the health authority, transferred to health centers to support the national health program, where they continued to provide their services uninterruptedly.
The interns in rural areas remained in them facing the shortcomings of these populations and the effects of the pandemic on the marginalized rural population.
The more than 1,500 UNAM medical interns acted under these conditions, along with 14,000 interns from other educational institutions in the country.
Nearly 15,000 medical residents, postgraduate specialty students, were always present during these terrible months showing great professionalism, empathy and dedication in strenuous work days, despite the risks to their health and that of their relatives and relatives.
UNAM doctors, researchers, teachers, and medical and nursing students have always been on the front line of containing the Sars-CoV-2 virus and caring for infected patients.
3.- As additional tasks:
The National University participated in a relevant way in the medical operation of the Temporary COVID-19 Unit, of Citibanamex, where medical interns, graduates, physical therapists; nurses from the academic entities Faculty of Medicine, FES Iztacala and Zaragoza, as well as from ENEO, were part of the team that treated around 9 thousand patients.
University medical staff carried out 23,000 Covid tests at different locations in CDMX.
Through the “Together for Health” initiative, university doctors collaborated so that 226 private hospitals continued to care for non-COVID-19 patients.
4,700 respirators were acquired and distributed and 1.3 million kits were delivered to 300 hospitals in the country, as well as 2.6 million face masks.
Together with the UNAM Foundation, more than 800,000 kits were delivered to health professionals from public institutions throughout the republic.
UNAM doctors trained more than 21,000 people on Covid prevention and care, and advice was provided to 13,000 more through the “Call & Chat Center COVID-19”.
One thousand 133 students and academics from Medicine, Nursing and Dentistry were trained to join, if necessary, the National Vaccination Campaign once morest the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Their services were not required, given the great mobilization that the State carried out for this purpose.
Various branches of the National University were set up as vaccination centers.
There are many testimonies of the above. There were thousands of university students who gave themselves with passion in the health crisis. These data and this clarification serve so that society is duly informed regarding the academic work and the commitment of the National Autonomous University of Mexico”.
During the morning conference, the president López Obrador He asserted that UNAM, instead of calling its medical students to face the pandemic, sent them home.
The president attacked the university because, he assured, this was a thought retrograde.
“It is like the case, with all due respect, of my alma mater, of UNAM; and I always say what I think, I am not going to shut up, to claim that we are facing the pandemic and, instead of calling on all the student doctors to face it, to help, they went home, ”he said.
With information from López-Dóriga Digital