“It seems to me that these numbers have to do with the estimate or calculation of whether the person would have been vaccinated three months earlier with the Pfizer vaccine, back in September (2020), when we started vaccinating in December/January. It seems to me that it has nothing to do with the general policy of Covid care,” he replied. Fernan Quiros in an interview he gave this morning on Urbana Play.
“That number has to do with what would have happened if we had vaccinated three months earlier. I don’t know who made that number“said the Buenos Aires official, who was one of the health leaders in the fight against Covid.
When asked again about excess deaths during the pandemic, a topic on which new research is now being carried out and conclusions are being drawn, the Buenos Aires official He denied that Argentina had been left in a bad position in comparison with other countries.
“There are technical issues to discuss in that. There are two works, one that compares the countries, which shows that Argentina did relatively well; and another that compares the provinces and the City of Buenos Aires, where The City fared extremely better“, he responded defending his management at the head of the health portfolio, when the head of government was Horacio Rodríguez Larreta.
Asked if lives had been saved, the minister was cautious and said that this statement “would have to be reduced to more technical details,” but he maintained that “Argentina was definitely in the middle of the range in the comparison of excess mortality”.
What Milei said about the Covid pandemic in Argentina
Last week, in a harsh speech he gave to a sympathetic audience at the Madrid Forum, the meeting of conservative leaders held in Buenos Aires, President Javier Milei had targeted Argentina’s handling of the pandemic.
“The system of political privileges and the impoverishment of the rest of society are two sides of the same coin. This apartheid system showed its most grotesque face during the pandemic, which left people without work and children without education – for more than a year – while politicians who talked a lot about saving lives stole vaccines for their friends. Imagine what the lives of these people are worth to these people, here in Argentina and around the world. With the aggravating factor that – days ago – the person who was the Minister of Economy of the autocrat, because today it is worth saying it, the autocratic beater, Alberto Fernández, confessed that since the pandemic raised their image, they used it and locked us up for political gain,” said the president.
The president said this during his participation in the Madrid Forum, the meeting of conservative leaders held in Buenos Aires.
His reference was to the statements of Martín Guzmán, who during an interview said that he had questioned the extension of the quarantine, but that this measure “became a more political issue. A political banner was the fact that it was the management of the pandemic that made the Government strong.”
In his speech at the conservative meeting, Milei recalled that during the quarantine he published the book Pandenomics “and one of the things that one noticed – when looking at the numbers – was that – if Argentina – had done things like a mediocre country, 30,000 people should have died from COVID“. Then, as a joke, he said “30 thousand for real,” in a new allusion to the number of people who disappeared during the Dictatorship that his administration downplayed and even officially refuted in the video he released on March 24, commemorating the Day of Remembrance.
“That criminal quarantine It ended up taking 110,000 more people than would have been normal. That is, 140,000 people died, but 110,000 were the responsibility of a criminal government. A government that – when it was pointed out what was happening – sent its media henchmen, those corrupt, envelope-wearing journalists to persecute all of us who criticized the quarantine. They boasted of being a government of scientists, and – from that pulpit – they accused everyone, complicit health professionals. Someday someone is going to study or analyze – in Argentina – why if the solution to attack an epidemic all over the world was testing, why, in Argentina, so little testing was done,” concluded Milei.
