Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The Minister of Health of Argentina, Ginés González García, resigned at the request of President Alberto Fernández, after it was announced his relatives had been vaccinated against covid-19 in his office, without having to ask for an appointment like the other Argentines.
“In response to your explicit request, I present my resignation from the position of Health Minister,” González García wrote in a letter to the president last Friday.
In his place was appointed secretary of access to health care, Carla Vizzotti, a 48-year-old specialist in internal medicine, who will be sworn in on Saturday afternoon, the presidency announced.
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Vizzoti stood out for getting Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine for Argentina, the first country in America to approve and use it. González García, 75, who was already in charge of that portfolio during Néstor Kirchner’s reign (2003-2007), took office in December 2019, dealing with the entire coronavirus pandemic.
His management, through trial and error, was absolutely marred by the ‘privileged’ vaccinations at the Ministry of Health headquarters, which met the same day that the city of Buenos Aires made the request for online plows to vaccinate people over 80 . Monday, a mechanism that almost immediately collapsed in the face of huge demand.
So far, only health personnel have been vaccinated in Argentina. The vaccination for people over 70 in the province of Buenos Aires only started on Wednesday.
“Immorality”
The scandal broke out after journalist Horacio Verbitsky told the radio on Friday that his long friendship with the minister allowed him to get vaccinated in his office.
“I decided to get vaccinated. I started figuring out where to do it. I called my old friend Ginés González García, who I knew long before he was a minister,” said Verbitsky, 71.
It caused the scandal a cataract of reactions on social media under the hashtag #vacunasvip. In addition to Verbitsky, other people close to the government were also vaccinated at the Ministry of Health, according to the local press.
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González García stressed in his letter of resignation that “the vaccinated people belong to the groups that are part of the target population of the current campaign,” referring to the over-70s.
In addition to his activities as a journalist, Verbitsky is also chairman of the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), dedicated to human rights.
Roberto Navarro, owner of Uncover Radio, the station on which Verbitsky revealed his vaccination, announced that he was ending his collaborations. “It is an immorality that with 50,000 deaths people have been vaccinated VIP. It is immoral who authorized it and who was vaccinated,” Navarro wrote on Twitter.
The CELS employees also condemned the fact. “We got the news that the president of our organization has been vaccinated outside the established system, through a chain of favors and in a personal capacity (…) The CELS team of employees is rejecting this or any other action or privilege,” posted on Twitter.
The the vaccination started at the end of December last year with Sputnik V, from the Russian laboratory Gamaleya, but the process is much slower than initially expected due to the lack of doses.
President Fernández and Vice President Cristina Kirchner were among the first to receive the vaccine. Both over the age of 60 did it in front of the cameras to convey confidence in the vaccine.
So far Argentina has received 1,220,000 doses of Sputnik V and 580,000 Covishield from Indian Institute Serum, arriving last Wednesday.
The plan will later include Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccines, until 62 million doses of various contracts are finalized this year, including one with the international collaborative mechanism Covax.