[ad_1]
The Foreign Minister of Peru, Elizabeth Astete, resigned this Sunday punctuated by the political storm unleashed by the complaint of vaccinations reserved to authorities before the immunization of the population, being the second to leave the cabinet of interim president Francisco Sagasti for this case.
“I have presented to the President of the Republic my letter of resignation from the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs”Astete said in a statement posted on his Twitter account, in which he admitted that it was a “serious mistake” to have been vaccinated on January 22.
Sagasti announced minutes later that he accepted the resignation of the head of Peruvian diplomacy.
“Tonight I received the letter of resignation from Chancellor Elizabeth Astete, which I accepted”the president tweeted.
The political storm was unleashed on Thursday when a Lima newspaper reported that then-president Marín Vizcarra had been vaccinated in October, weeks before he was removed by Congress in a whirlwind impeachment trial.
The revelation sparked a wave of congressional criticism of the government, leading to the resignation of Health Minister Pilar Mazzetti on Friday.
Although in other countries, presidents and officials have been vaccinated in public to set an example for the population, in the Peruvian case the criticism is directed at the fact that members of the government received the doses without communicating it and when the formal vaccination campaign had not yet started.
Vaccination with the first 300,000 doses of the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinopharm in the country just began last Tuesday and is currently aimed at health personnel.
The popular former president Vizcarra (2018-2020), who is seeking a seat in Congress in the April elections, defended himself by saying that he was a volunteer in the Sinopharm clinical trial, like thousands of other Peruvians.
But the university in charge of the trial denied that he or his wife had volunteered for the study.
Peru accumulates as of this Saturday 43,491 deaths from covid-19, with 1.22 million confirmed cases and 1.13 million people recovered.
The health system is saturated with 14,222 hospitalized patients and a deficit of 20% in the demand for medicinal oxygen.
[ad_2]
