The US will not donate vaccines to Venezuela due to a “lack of transparency”. The decision was announced by James Story, the US Ambassador in Caracas.
The US has recently offered to donate 80 million doses of vaccine by the end of June with the first consignment of 25 million intended to be donated immediately after the decision was announced on 3 June. Up to 75% of these will be distributed via the UN-led COVAX platform which aims to deliver vaccines to developing countries. The other 25% will be donated directly to countries in need, the US indicated.
“I don’t want to say that we will never offer vaccines to Venezuela. We will just not send them within the first batch due to lack of transparency when it comes to administering vaccines amongst people who really need them. A transparent system of vaccines administration is needed so that obtaining the shot doesn’t depend on a homeland card (Venezuelan document of identity) or on being a friend of somebody who is a protégé of Maduro’s administration or works for the regime. It cannot depend on people’s political views, but on the necessity each person has,” said James Story.
The reaction of the Venezuelan administration to this decision was harsh.
“They hate us, they have negative, miserable feelings about us,” said President Nicolas Maduro in a video released on social media.
Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Jorge Arreaza, added that:
“with these types of opinions, they [the US] only demonstrate their continued hatred towards the Venezuelan people”.
Meanwhile, thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets on 28 May demanding that the government introduce a credible and effective immunization plan. At the moment, the Venezuelan immunization process is still experiencing delays, missed deadlines and the authorities are merely offering unrealistic figures and promises. While Maduro’s government has blamed the sanctions imposed by the previous US administration of Donald Trump for the delay in vaccinations, it has declared that it will be able to have the pandemic under control by September or October 2021.
As the authorities have refrained from making public any reliable statistics, it is hard to ascertain the number of people who have been vaccinated. The President of the Caracas Nurses’ Association, Ana Rosario Contreras, said that “Venezuelans are dying from a lack of medical attention due to severely strained hospitals”.
“I have to tell the health minister that the first thing he needs to do is tell the country the truth. When he said 90% of health workers are vaccinated, he’s referring to Caracas, but Caracas is not Venezuela. I invite him to go to Portuguesa, where an upswing in COVID cases has caused a state of alarm, where the hospitals have collapsed, where the nurses have no protection; or to go to Barinas state (where) the nurses are covering themselves with black bags, go to Aragua where the staff (level) is at 40 percent,” she added.
As of May, the government has disclosed that Venezuela recorded 215,301 cases and 2,396 deaths since March 2020 when the pandemic broke out. However, Enrique López-Loyo, the President of Venezuela’s National Academy of Medicine, said that official data should be multiplied by eight to 10 to reflect the real state of affairs as Venezuela has undertaken very few tests only having achieved between 2,500 – 3,000 daily by the end of 2020.
