Fury in Peru after officials secretly received vaccine before health workers

[Judi Lynn]

Peruvian Foreign Minister Elizabeth Astete, left in December with interim president Francisco Sagasti, resigned this week after it was revealed she had secretly received the coronavirus vaccine before the country’s front-line health workers. (Peru Presidency/Via Reuters)

By Simeon Tegel
Feb. 17, 2021 at 3:14 p.m. CST

LIMA, Peru — When interim president Francisco Sagasti finally unveiled Peru's first coronavirus vaccine deal last month, Peruvians wearied by nearly a year of health and economic crises compounded by the country's recent political turmoil glimpsed a light at the end of the tunnel.

As ICU doctors and nurses this month began receiving their shots from the first batch — 300,000 doses from the Chinese company Sinopharm — cautious optimism began to spread. Sagasti said he hoped to have a third of Peru’s 32 million people vaccinated by the time he steps down on July 28. But the mood in this Andean nation has now turned to uncontained fury. The government has acknowledged that hundreds of high officials and other well-connected VIPs jumped the vaccination queue beginning late last year to secretly get shots before the front-line health workers.

The scandal, which the Peruvian media have dubbed “Vaccinegate,” broke last week with the news that Sagasti’s predecessor, Martín Vizcarra, received his two jabs in October, just before he was controversially ousted by Congress for unrelated alleged corruption.

Vizcarra, 57, initially insisted, to widespread skepticism, that he had “bravely” been part of a Sinopharm trial of 12,000 volunteers. He even claimed he had later tested negative for antibodies and therefore concluded he had received a placebo.But as the scandal mushroomed, Lima’s Cayetano Heredia medical school, which oversaw the trial, said the former president was not one of its volunteers. Vizcarra responded by tweeting his “great surprise” and insisting his actions had “not prejudiced anyone, much less the [Peruvian] state.”

More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/peru-coronavirus-vaccine-scandal/2021/02/17/81ef7958-712c-11eb-93be-c10813e358a2_story.html