Peru’s Secretary of State Elizabeth Astete resigned this Sunday, punctuated by the political storm unleashed by the complaint about vaccinations reserved for the authorities prior to the immunization of the population, and was the second to appeal to the interim president Francisco Sagasti for this matter left.
“I presented my letter of resignation as Secretary of State to the President of the Republic,” Astete said in a statement on his Twitter account, admitting it was a “serious mistake” vaccinated on Jan. 22.
Sagasti announced minutes later that he was accepting the resignation of the head of Peruvian diplomacy.
“Tonight I received Chancellor Elizabeth Astete’s letter of resignation, which I have accepted,” the president tweeted.
The political storm unleashed on Thursday when a Lima newspaper reported that then-President Marín Vizcarra had been vaccinated in October, weeks before he was deposed by Congress in a blitzkrieg impeachment.
The revelation sparked a wave of congressional criticism of the government, leading to the resignation of Health Minister Pilar Mazzetti on Friday.
While in other countries presidents and officials have been publicly vaccinated to set an example for the population, in the Peruvian case, the criticism has focused on members of the government receiving the doses without communicating them and when the formal vaccination campaign had taken place. not started yet.
Vaccination with the first 300,000 doses from the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinopharm in the country just started last Tuesday and is currently targeting health workers.
Popular former president Vizcarra (2018-2020), who is seeking a seat in Congress in April’s election, defended himself by saying that, like thousands of other Peruvians, he volunteered in the clinical trial of Sinopharm.
But the university responsible for the trial denied that he or his wife had volunteered for the study.
Peru has 43,491 deaths from Covid-19 as of Saturday, with 1.22 million confirmed cases and 1.13 million people recovered.
The health system is saturated with 14,222 hospital admissions and a 20% shortage in the demand for medicinal oxygen.