Argentine Health Minister Ginés Gonzalez Garcia resigned Friday February 19 at the request of President Alberto Fernandez after revelations that he was offering his friends to be vaccinated at the ministry, thus avoiding them having to make an appointment you in a hospital beforehand.
He was replaced by Carla Vizzotti, 48, a specialist in internal medicine and known to have negotiated the Russian vaccine Sputnik V for Argentina, according to the official Telam news agency.
Mr Gonzalez Garcia, 75, had been in the post since 2019 and had handled the pandemic from the start, but his tenure was tarnished by the ‘privileged vaccine’ scandal. This is the journalist Horacio Verbitsky, 71 – one of the first to investigate the mechanism of the “death thefts” during the dictatorship in his book El Vuelo, published in 1995 – who told himself on the radio that he had been vaccinated at the ministry as instructed by his old friend the minister.
The journalist made the admission the same day that in Buenos Aires a municipal website was set up allowing people over the age of 80 to make an appointment to be vaccinated from Monday – almost instantly saturated the demand has been enormous.
Flurry of reactions
According to the local press, besides Mr. Verbitsky, other people close to the government were vaccinated at the Ministry of Health. The scandal sparked a surge of reactions on social media under the hashtag #vacunasvip (“#vaccinsVIP”).
Mr. Gonzalez Garcia pointed out in his resignation letter that “People vaccinated apart[enai]to groups included in the target population of the current campaign ”, or people over 70, who can be vaccinated since Wednesday.
Roberto Navarro, boss of the radio station on which Horacio Verbitsky revealed he was vaccinated, announced that he had put an end to the journalist’s contributions, saying on Twitter it was “Immoral that, with 50,000 dead, VIPs are vaccinated. It is immoral to know who authorized it and who was vaccinated ”.
Argentina exceeded the threshold of 50,000 deaths linked to Covid-19 on February 13 and has more than two million cases of contamination by the coronavirus, announced the health ministry. So far, the country has received 1,220,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine and 580,000 doses of the Indian Covishield vaccine, which arrived on Wednesday.
The plan then includes receiving doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. In total, Argentina is expected to receive 62 million doses of vaccines this year depending on the different firms from which it has ordered (including the Covax international cooperation mechanism). Peru’s political class is shaken by a similar scandal, which involves the discreet vaccination of 487 personalities – including a former president, two ministers, civil servants, academics, businessmen and the apostolic nuncio – , even before the immunization campaign was launched.
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