Ecuadorian Minister of Health was expelled | Jaime Dur …

From Quito.

The privileged vaccines scandal in Ecuador cost former health minister Rodolfo Farfán his position on Friday. Vacunagold, this is how we know the secret vaccination scandal in Ecuador. Dissemination of the names of people vaccinated to the government of Lenin Moreno and the presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso This happened after several weeks of rumors about the existence of a secret list.

The names published, even without knowing if this is the final list, involve people such as former ministers, a former president, a journalist, a university rector, or Jaime Duran Barba, adviser to candidate Lasso, and his brother. The presidency, in this context, made public the list of people vaccinated from the environment close to the president, like his wife, Rocío González, and 12 people from his personal entourage, assistants, security or residence managers.

The appearance of the list confirmed the covert vaccination which was under investigation by the attorney general’s office, which last Wednesday raided the facilities of the Ministry of Health. “The versions obtained in recent hours show that there is a detailed file of people vaccinated, which suggests that there is information that has been hidden and that it would be used for the investigation in progress”, had reported the prosecution. .

The investigation into the hidden management of vaccine distribution began with the complaints against Farfán’s predecessor, Juan Carlos Zevallos, who vaccinated his mother with the arrival of the first batch of eight thousand vaccines brought into the country. Zevallos resigned at the end of February to travel the next day to Miami, where he is now, under investigation for an alleged crime of influence peddling.

Zevallos was replaced on the last day of February by Farfán, who submitted his resignation for vaccine gold in a further worsening of the situation the country faces. During his tenure of less than twenty days, new vaccination scandals emerged, such as that of two young Tik Tok influencers and several members of the Rotary club in the city of Samborombón.

The disclosure of the names and the resignation of the second minister took place in a context where, in a country of more than 17 million inhabitants, until March 15, 121,054 people were vaccinated with the first dose and 20,136 with the second. Ecuador, which has signed a contract with several companies, such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Sinovac and through the Covax initiative, received to date 1.5 percent of the total 20 million vaccines marketed.

The new chapter of the crisis in Ecuador is part of what have been the last months of the Moreno government, which will leave presidential power on May 24, marked by mismanagement in the face of the pandemic, resignations in his government, like that of Chancellor Luis Gallegos a week ago, and critical scenarios, such as the prison massacres in February, which left 78 people dead in total.

The new crisis in turn impacted Lasso’s candidacy, in particular for the case of Durán Barba and its proximity to many of the people involved in the vaccine gold. The scandal appears a few weeks before the second electoral round which will take place on April 11, during which Lasso, nicknamed the banker candidate, will face Andrés Arauz, citizen revolution candidate, who came first in the February 7 competition.

The two candidates will meet next Sunday for the presidential debate, a central electoral body in Ecuador. It is hoped that the various political projects can be exhibited there, even if, in the case of Lasso, his campaign consisted, among other things, in denying his responsibility on the 1999 public holiday, his status as a banker with numerous offshore accounts, as well as his neoliberal proposal in continuity with the Moreno government’s plan.

The debate will take place in a framework marked by the definitive abandonment of Yaku perez, third in the first round, in his request that 20 thousand minutes be counted. The Litigation Electoral Tribunal rejected his request, before which he exhausted the various instances he had requested in his complaint for fraud. The candidate of Pachakutik party He announced to this scenario that: “I do not trust and do not trust the finalist candidates, they stole our elections from us.” Already the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), whose political instrument is Pachakutik, had organically decided to call an “ideological null vote”.

The threat that persists in the electoral process lies in the attorney general’s office, where the complaint lodged by the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office on alleged funding by the National Liberation Army that Arauz’s campaign would have received. The case returned to center stage with the arrival in Ecuador last Wednesday of Colombia’s deputy prosecutor, Martha janeth mancero, to address this file, denied from the outset by Arauz, and denounced by many national and foreign voices as an international operation to interfere in the elections and affect the candidacy of Arauz.

Faced with this situation, the Union for Hope, the political force for which Arauz is presented, called to “be alert and mobilized”, and denounced “in front of the country and the international community that we are facing a new attempt to attack democracy in Ecuador”.