Peru’s Foreign Minister Elizabeth Astete resigned on Sunday punctuated by the political storm triggered by the vaccination complaint reserved for the authorities before the population was immunized, being the second to leave the office of interim President Francisco Sagasti for this case.
“I submitted my resignation letter to the President of the Republic as Minister of Foreign Affairs,” Astete said in a statement posted on his Twitter account, admitting that it was a “grave mistake” to have been vaccinated on January 22. .
Sagasti announced a few minutes later that he accepted the resignation of the head of Peruvian diplomacy.
“Tonight I received the resignation letter of Chancellor Elizabeth Astete, which I accepted,” the president wrote on Twitter.
The political storm was triggered on Thursday, when a newspaper in Lima reported that the then president, Marín Vizcarra, was vaccinated in October, a few weeks before he was removed by Congress on a charge of blitzkrieg.
The revelation sparked a wave of criticism from Congress over the government, leading to the resignation of Health Minister Pilar Mazzetti on Friday.
Although in other countries, presidents and officials have been publicly vaccinated to set an example to the population, in the Peruvian case criticism has been leveled that members of the government received the doses without communicating them and when the formal vaccination campaign took place. not started yet.
Vaccination with the first 300,000 doses of the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinopharm in the country just started last Tuesday and is currently being addressed to the medical staff.
The popular former president Vizcarra (2018-2020), who is looking for 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 volunteered for the study.
Peru has accumulated 43,491 deaths caused by covid-19 since Saturday, with 1.22 million confirmed cases and 1.13 million people recovered.
The health system is saturated with 14,222 hospitalized and a 20% deficit in the demand for medicinal oxygen.