Paraguay publishes names of people vaccinated to stop COVID fraud Coronavirus pandemic News

The public database of the South American nation lists each person’s name, place of vaccination, type of vaccine, and number of doses so that citizens can see if they are skipping the line.

Overwhelmed by low shots and coronaviruses, the country with one of the highest death rates in Covid-19 is taking a new approach to tackling vaccine corruption: publishing the names of everyone who receives a shot.

For those who want to know if a friend, neighbor or member of the Paraguayan political elite is among the 400,000 people with inoculation, the answer is just a few clicks away on the website of the Ministry of Health. It lists the person’s name, place of vaccination, type of vaccine and number of doses in a public database. He stepped forward and former president Fernando Lugo got his first shot on Sputnik V on May 19 and well-known Paraguayan comedian Carlitos Vera received the Covaxin jab.

“It’s a tool for citizen oversight,” Deputy Health Minister Lida Sosa said in an interview. There were people who looked at the list and were vaccinated who were not “candidates.”

The level of disclosure in Paraguay would be banned in many countries with stricter health and privacy laws. There is just enough shooting to fully integrate 7% of the population and there is a deeply rooted corruption culture – Paraguay is ranked second worst in South America in Transparency International’s 2020 corruption perceptions index – there is widespread concern about people wanting to jump to the top. line. VIPs, vaccination scandals, government officials and politicians who secretly used their influence to get shot, traveled to Argentina, Peru, Lebanon, Spain and the Philippines.

In Paraguay, people who receive vaccines can apply not to be on the public list, but so far no one has asked for anonymity, according to Sosa.

Valentin Sanchez, a 23-year-old Paraguayan software engineer living in the U.S., is a famous person who returns home thanks to his efforts to find irregular vaccines.

Sanchez was writing a program to analyze vaccine data from the Ministry of Health in April when his girlfriend suggested he also look for vaccine scams to find out how the shots were given. He found more than 500 suspicious cases by comparing vaccine list names and personal IDs with those of public databases of officials and politicians.

Although many of them showed that they were people with physical disabilities who had the right to shoot, his head found Mirta Gusinky, when he was a senator in the Colorado party government, who was out of turn. Gusinky resigned last month amid a public outcry. In the same week, the Ministry of Health said it would target 88 unjustified tax vaccines after examining 518 cases that came to its attention.

“Because we have few vaccines and people don’t trust the process, the only way to give them some confidence is through this list,” Sanchez said. “People will use their influence if they can to get vaccinated. We are talking about life or death. “

Vaccine Trickle

The government has bought or received 981,400 doses of six different vaccines as free, with orders to shoot 8 million that are still almost unfulfilled. Wealthy Paraguayans are not waiting, and thousands of people have gone to Miami or other parts of the U.S. to be vaccinated. At the moment, only health workers, pregnant women and people aged 60 and over are eligible for Paraguayan ownership.

According to data collected by Bloomberg, the country where the virus has killed more than 10,000 people has the highest per capita death rate in the world in the last 7 days, with 122 million people nearly 122 dead. It has the number 6 according to infections. The death rate since the pandemic began is among the top 30 in the world.

The situation could be critical until July, when people who are “tired and exhausted” ignore social measures such as social exclusion and masks, according to Deputy Health Minister Sosa.

“That is reflected in our currently saturated health care system,” Sosa said. “We are in the most critical phase of the pandemic.”