On December 24 of last year, with the sun barely rising, different government representatives, led by President Sebastián Piñera, appeared at Group 10 of the Air Force to receive the first shipment of 10,000 vaccines against Covid-19. . Few hours later, Nurse Zulema Riquelme received the first dose at the Metropolitan Hospital, starting – almost on a national chain – the vaccination campaign against the virus.
As indicated by the expert advisory committees and the technical agencies of the Ministry of Health, the first injections were intended solely for health personnel. And not all of them: the officials of the Intensive Care Units were privileged, with the understanding that they were the most exposed to being infected.
But this was not fully met. And what at first were corridor rumors and later a complaint, was confirmed this week by the Seremi de Salud de la Región Metropolitana, at the end of the summary carried out.
Two people outside the ICU and the health personnel were inoculated that day with the first doses of vaccine landed in Chile.
As confirmed by the Seremi to Third, “there were irregularities in compliance with technical guidelines arranged by the Ministry of Health during the vaccination process against Covid-19, developed for officials of the Public Assistance Emergency Hospital (formerly the Central Post Office), in December 2020 ″.
It is specifically Enrique Díaz Valderrama, at that time the campus’s legal advisor, and his wife, Marta Bravo Vidal, outside the service, who received the doses on the eve of Christmas.
The investigation developed by the RM Health Seremi established that, after reviewing the site’s discharges, “The Health Authority concluded that the entity did not manage to disprove the charges to exempt itself from the responsibility that falls to it in the facts,” Therefore, a sanction of 600 UTM ($ 31.7 million) was determined for the health center and 150 UTM ($ 7.8 million) for its technical director, the doctor Osvaldo Carrasco.
The case is reminiscent of the one known last July, when Seremi herself joined the Las Condes Clinic for applying a third dose, when he was not yet part of the program, to Alejandro Gil, president of the company’s board of directors, which ended with the resignation of the head of Ambulatory Services.
–
