PANAMA (AP) – On a Monday in June, in an affluent area of the Panamanian capital, some neighbors noticed an unusual movement: cars were driving in and out of the parking lot of a building where an apartment had been renovated just a few days earlier.
In that unit of the Coco del Mar Suites building, someone was carrying out a clandestine vaccination against the coronavirus with alleged doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, despite the fact that in the Central American country the inoculations are free and are applied according to age and risk group .
Investigators soon linked it to another clandestine vaccination detected a week earlier on the 43rd floor of a skyscraper in the wealthy coastal neighborhood of Punta Pacifica.
The authorities have confirmed that only 32 people were inoculated, but the events have caused anger among Panamanians, including the chronically ill, who are waiting for vaccines while the nation of 4.2 million inhabitants experiences a rebound in infections.
“Here they are people of money and they would have some contact with someone to get vaccinated,” Jacinto Ortega, a Panamanian in his 40s, told The Associated Press when he arrived in Punta Pacifica to deliver food to some residents.
The first day of clandestine vaccination took place on June 1 at the home of a woman identified as Celine Gazal de Esses. Fifteen people were allegedly inoculated, including relatives of Gazal and some employees, according to the investigation supervised by Attorney General Javier Caraballo.
Denisse Vega, owner at Coco del Mar Suites, found out about it and contacted Gazal to find out how to reach people offering vaccines.
On June 7, Vega watched from the third-floor windows at those who came to her apartment to get vaccinated. According to the newspaper La Prensa, which revealed the vaccination in Coco del Mar Suites, some arrived in luxury cars and others did so in ordinary sedans. Seventeen people received the vaccine that day including, according to the researchers, some employees of two pharmaceutical laboratories where Vega worked as a manager.
Both places were raided but neither Gazal nor Vega have been arrested or charged with any crime.
Until now, the Public Ministry has only detained one person, identified as Matías Pérez Escudero, a 40-year-old driver of a funeral home who is charged with fraud, ideological falsehood and illegal exercise of the profession of doctor, considering that it was one of those who managed and applied the presumed vaccines in Coco del Mar Suites and Punta Pacifica.
Pérez Escudero has not made public statements and it is not clear if he has a lawyer. The prosecutor said they are looking for a possible accomplice.
Caraballo indicated that Vega also gave 12 cards to those vaccinated and another two were seized in a search carried out at Gazal’s home. He assured that, according to information from the National Director of the Immunization Program of the Ministry of Health, the cards are not those that the ministry gives to those vaccinated against the virus and the batch numbers have no relation to the shipments of Pfizer- BioNTech received in Panama.
It is still unknown if the vaccines were actually from Pfizer-BioNTech and where the suspected inoculants came from.
The researchers asked the 32 vaccinated people to undergo laboratory tests to determine if they received the drug, but it has not been said when the results will be released.
Ezra Ángel, a lawyer for Gazal, told the AP that those who were in his client’s house were victims of “a scam by an isolated subject” and believe they were injected with a saline solution because in the tests that were done in private clinics, they did not antibodies were detected.
For his part, Vega’s lawyer, Abilio Batista, said in statements to the media that “everything is being duly clarified. In due course they will have all the information ”. Vega was separated from the laboratories where she worked.
Authorities have not publicly identified those who received the injections. A lawyer for a group of them, Alfredo Vallarino, told the press that they attended after receiving a WhatsApp message asking them to appear in groups of 12 and pay $ 200 to be vaccinated.
“I want to speak to the country loud and clear,” said President Laurentino Cortizo. “There is no room to play with people’s lives and health. Vaccines in Panama under the administration of Nito (Laurentino) Cortizo are not paid, nobody has to pay a penny for the vaccines that are given in this country, nobody, let that be very clear ”.
However, the case has shaken the health sector.
For the renowned Panamanian researcher and infectologist Xavier Sáenz-Llorens, “credibility is on the line. There are already multiple anomalies while people at risk, still on the waiting list, remain unprotected and vulnerable to being hospitalized or dying ”.
“It is a great irresponsibility of the people who promoted this situation because it really threatens the public health of all Panamanians,” Faustina Díaz Quirós, president of the Panamanian Association of Patients and Relatives with Hematological Diseases and the Federation of Associations of Patients with Critical, Chronic and Degenerative Diseases.
“He plays alive, ‘I have money and I can do what I want’ that is not correct, it is reprehensible and there must definitely be a punishment,” he added.
Until the last week of June, Panama applied just over 1.4 million doses, but only the equivalent of 17% of the population to be immunized has received the complete scheme. More than 80% of the vaccines are from Pfizer-BioNTech and the rest from AstraZeneca. Panama exceeds 403,000 infections and 6,500 deaths from the virus.
Other Latin American countries have been affected by scandals related to COVID-19 vaccines.
In Argentina, the Minister of Health and chief in charge of the fight against the coronavirus resigned in February after a well-known journalist admitted that he had been given a vaccine against the coronavirus on a preferential basis. Later it was learned that legislators, mayors and others close to power were ahead of priority groups, such as health personnel and the elderly.
And in Peru, the president announced that same month that nearly 500 officials, including former ministers, took advantage of their positions to secretly receive the first injections of a Chinese vaccine that the government had purchased for health workers.
The clandestine vaccination scandal in Panama is a reflection of inequality, evidenced in the contrast between the gleaming luxury skyscrapers and the squalid neighborhoods that surround them.
Eva Pérez, a nutrition club owner who was in a coma before the pandemic after suffering from pneumonia, said she was eager to get the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine quickly. But she was left with no choice but to receive the one from AstraZeneca on June 21 after the government approved that inoculant for women over 30.
“There are privileged people,” said Pérez, 40, referring to those secretly vaccinated with alleged doses of Pfizer. “He always ‘plays alive.’ This is Panama ”.
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