In addition to the procurement processes, information on the registration of stands and the national vaccination plan will also not be available to the public for the next three years.
The Ministry of Health of El Salvador (Minsal) declared the full reservation of information related to the application and purchase of covid-19 vaccines, thus prohibiting access to these data for periods between 3 and 5 years, according to a document consulted by Efe on Wednesday.
Index of reserved information Minsal, updated on March 11 on its transparency website, indicates that information on “SARS-Cov-2 vaccine procurement processes” will be reserved for 5 years.
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Public access to the “National Vaccine Implementation Plan” against SARS-Cov-2 ”and to the“ Register of SARS-Cov-2 vaccination booths ”will be reserved for three years.
The responsible units, according to the document, are the Procurement and Contracting Unit, the National Directorate of First Level of Attention, the National Center for Biologists (Cenabi) and the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (CAPI).
The health portfolio justified the action in paragraph D of Article 19 of the Law on Access to Public Information, which indicates that it is confidential information “that clearly endangers the life, safety or health of any person”.
The health portfolio justified the action in paragraph D of Article 19 of the Law on Access to Public Information. Photo: EDH / Archive
That law indicates that confidential information is that ‘access to which is expressly restricted in accordance with that law, because of a general interest for a specified period and for justified reasons’.
This is not the only information about the covid-19 pandemic that Minsal has kept secret.
According to the Transparency portal, “SARS-Cov-2 vaccine acquisition processes” will be reserved for 5 years. Photo: Kindness Transparencia.gob.sv
In June 2020, he declared the full reservation of the documentation generated by the National Public Health Laboratory “which contains information related to the mechanisms for taking, processing and disseminating test results for covid-19, addressed to various departments of the Ministry of Health. Health “.
Other information declared in reserve by Minsal, since President Nayib Bukele came to the executive, is the purchase of advertising and the document “National Health Plan”, including annexes, as recorded in the index mentioned above.
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El Salvador received at least 105 thousand 80 doses of covid-19 vaccines from the pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca (53 thousand 600) and Pfizer (51 thousand 480), of which 85 thousand 80 were donated by the Covax system of the World Health Organization. for Health (WHO).
The government of El Salvador is counting on the “immunity of the herd” to deal with the pandemic, and the Ministry of Health aims to vaccinate 4.5 million Salvadorans.
El Salvador officially registers 63,766 infected people, of which 61,009 recovered and 1,990 died.
Reactions to blocking information
Transparency experts say this affects people’s right to be informed about issues related to their health and lives.
“This information has no legal basis to be classified as confidential,” Wilson Sandoval, coordinator of the Anti-Corruption Legal Advice Center (Alac-Funde), told El Diario de Hoy.
According to Sandoval, it is not enough to cite Article 19 of the LAIP. The government must justify it and it must respect the law, respect the reasonableness (to prove that the reservation effectively protects the rights it claims to protect) and the temporality (explain why Salvadorans are more secure in not being able to disclose this information for specified period).
Xenia Hernández, director of the DTJ Foundation, condemned the reservation and recalled that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had requested that information on COVID-19, tests and vaccines be made public and even informal. That is, it is available even if it has not been requested by citizens.
“They should report proactively, because these are extremely relevant data, so that pandemic management has a greater impact and outcome,” he said.
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