• Latin America The 'VIP vaccination' of Argentina: politicians, trade unionists, businessmen and people close to power were immunized

  • Argentina Carlos Menem, the controversial Peronist who ruled Argentina for a decade, dies

After four days of unstoppable growth in the "VIP vaccines" scandal in Argentina, President Alberto Fernández decided to attack this Tuesday.

And the objectives were clear: the opposition, justice and the media.

"Let's end the clowning," Fernández said in Mexico City during a joint press conference with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

"I ask the prosecutors or judges to do what they have to.

There is no crime of the one who went ahead in line to get the vaccine.

There is no such crime, you cannot build crimes gracefully.

I do not know where they studied or who he approved them

. I ask the prosecutors to reread the penal code, they have already done too many scoundrels. "

The fierce attack by Fernández, a law professor at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), has to do with the complaints and the raid on the Ministry of Health, on whose second floor a "VIP vaccination center" was installed to immunize politicians, businessmen and family members of high positions.

When the scandal broke out on Friday, Fernández fired the Minister of Health, Ginés González García, and replaced him with his number two,

Carla Vizzotti

.

But the situation does not give truce neither to the president nor to the minister.

Justice not only raided the Ministry, but is preparing to do the same in the Posadas Hospital, the axis of the parallel vaccination system that led to all kinds of people linked to power being immunized in

a country that until now has vaccinated only the one percent of its population

.

Among the privileged are former President Eduardo Duhalde, the Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán, legislators, trade unionists, press advisers, family members, drivers and journalists related to power.

Fernández tried, carefully observed by López Obrador, to limit the scandal, although his words and arguments ended up amplifying it.

"The risk is that we end up politicizing it. Under irregular circumstances a group of around 70 people was vaccinated. The concept of irregular is a piece of information to review, because among those vaccinated there are people who should be vaccinated.

I had to give myself the vaccine. because the Argentine media said that the Russian vaccine should not be trusted.

For the same reason, the vaccine was given to (the vice president) Cristina (Fernández de Kirchner) ".

"There was a ruthless campaign unleashed in Argentina by the opposition saying that the Sputnik V vaccine was poison.

Now they want us to give the poison to them. They want more poison,"

argued Fernández, who repeatedly named former president Mauricio Macri and He detailed corruption cases in which his predecessor would be involved, while insistently demanding justice and the media for his actions.

"They can investigate Macri's toll business, the terrible debt that Argentina experienced. They can investigate the business of wind farms, the emptying of Congress, the responsibility of a minister who sent a submarine to kill 44 people. Look at everything. they have to investigate, "the head of state told prosecutors and judges of his country from Mexico City.

The worst scandal in the 14 months of government

López Obrador picked up the gauntlet and accused the press of his country of

"keeping quiet like mummies"

before the powerful, at the same time that he uncovered a string of Spanish companies supposedly favored by previous administrations.

Fernández and López Obrador seek to build a political alliance between two of the three largest economies in Latin America, which are, in turn, two of the countries in which the covid-19 hit the hardest worldwide.

The two heads of state closed an

agreement

in August 2020

whereby Argentina would manufacture the active principle

of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and Mexico would package and distribute it.

This Tuesday they confirmed that the distribution will begin in April to distribute 200 million doses equitably among the countries of Latin America.

While that happens,

the general feeling in Argentina is that the scandal has no ceiling.

The "definitive" list of the Ministry of Health that details the names of 70 vaccinated people pales in the face of complaints in provinces and municipalities.

In La Rioja, a province in the north of the country, almost the entire cabinet of ministers was vaccinated.

Local media speak a thousand people "irregularly vaccinated

"

and outside the health system, which is what is now the priority.

Sergio Massa, president of the Chamber of Deputies and third in the line of presidential succession, had his entire political family vaccinated.

Elisa Carrió, one of the leaders of a remarkably sparing opposition to a scandal that so far affects Peronist politicians,

asked that citizens march "in silence"

against the government.

"I call you to march in silence for an Argentine Republic with a moral identity, the old moral contract without which there is no culture, institutions, currency; without which we are being humiliated."

"Analyzing from the audience is very simple, playing the game is something else," insisted Fernández, appealing to a soccer metaphor to criticize the press in his country.

"For once I ask that we have intellectual honesty. The most miserable thing that can be done is politics with the misfortune of the pandemic. And

some protocols were skipped because in your diaries you wrote that we were poisoning people."

Beyond the arguments of the president, the "Vacunagate", as the Argentine media have called it, is

the worst scandal in the 14 months

of Fernández's

government

, whose image has been falling sharply for months in the middle of an economic crisis daunting.

According to a study by the consulting firm Giacobbe & Asociado published by 'La Nación',

"liar", "puppet" and "useless"

are the three terms with which the respondents mostly define the Argentine head of state these days.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

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