President Francisco Sagasti said he accepted Elizabeth Astete’s resignation and that an investigation was underway on other senior civil servants who received the first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Deputy Health Minister Luis Suárez Ognio also resigned due to reports that he was vaccinated before health professionals.
Vizcarra claimed that he and his wife, Maribel Diaz Cabello, were vaccinated as part of a clinical trial, but Cayetano Heredia University, responsible for the trials, denied that they participated as volunteers.
Speaking to local radio RPP on Sunday night, the president expressed his outrage at the scandal and said that the doses used to vaccinate government officials were donated by Sinopharm and were not part of the batch used for tests conducted by Cayetano Heredia University.
Health Minister Pilar Mazzetti resigned on Friday. New health minister Oscar Ugarte launched an investigation to identify other officials who were vaccinated last year, Sagasti said.
“With the transparency and firmness that characterize our Government, we will publish the results of the investigation and the information provided by the Center for Clinical Studies at Cayetano Heredia University”, he added.
Astete, who led Peruvian negotiations to buy the Sinopharm vaccine, said in a statement on Sunday that she had been vaccinated on January 22 with what she believed to be “the remaining doses of the batch maintained by Cayetano Heredia University”.
“As a result of the recent disclosure of the vaccination of (ex) President Vizcarra and his wife, as well as the understandable impact that this news had on public opinion, I am aware of the serious mistake I made, so I decided not to receive the second dose”, she said.
Peru received its first 300,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine on February 7 and started distributing it to frontline health professionals two days later – becoming the first Latin American country to do so.
The country has signed other agreements with Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca, but these vaccines have not yet been launched there.
Peru is currently struggling with a resurgence of the virus, reporting more than 6,000 cases a day – the fifth highest Covid-19 case count in Latin America, after Brazil, Colombia, Argentina and Mexico, according to data from Johns Hopkins University . It also faces a shortage of beds in intensive care and oxygen units as cases increase.