Argentine Health Minister Ginés González García resigned on Friday February 19 at the request of President Alberto Fernandez after revelations that he was offering his friends to be vaccinated at the ministry without making an appointment in a hospital .
He was replaced by Carla Vizzotti, a 48-year-old internal medicine specialist known to have negotiated Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine for Argentina, according to the official Telam news agency.
González García, 75, had been in the post since 2019 and had handled the pandemic from the start, but his tenure was tarnished by the scandal of “Privilege vaccines”. This is the journalist Horacio Verbitsky, 71 – one of the first to investigate the mechanism of “Flights of death” during the dictatorship in his book The flight 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, set up to allow people over the age of 80 to make an appointment to be vaccinated from Monday, was almost immediately saturated with a gigantic demand.
Flurry of reactions
According to the local press, in addition to 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 (“VIP vaccines”).
González García pointed out in his resignation letter that “The vaccinated people belong to the groups included in the target population of the current campaign”, that is to say people over 70, who can be vaccinated since Wednesday.
The boss of the radio station on which Horacio Verbitsky revealed he was vaccinated, Roberto Navarro, 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. Argentina has so far received 1,220,000 doses of Sputnik V and 580,000 doses of India’s Covishield vaccine, which arrived on Wednesday.
The plan then includes AstraZeneca vaccines, for a total of 62 million doses this year between the various contracts, including one with the international cooperation mechanism Covax. The political class of Peru is shaken by a similar scandal around the discreet vaccination of 487 personalities, including a former president, two ministers, civil servants, academics, businessmen and the apostolic nuncio even before the start of the immunization campaign.
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