The American linguist, political scientist, philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky referred in January 2020 to the unilateral coercive measures against the country and stated that “the sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the United States cut the means by which the Venezuelan government could have escaped of the economic recession, causing a dramatic drop in oil production and a severe economic crisis. The blockade caused the death of many people who could not access medicines that could have saved their lives.
According to the Venezuelan Anti-Blockade Observatory, the Obama Decree and the subsequent sanctions produce a serious disturbance in national life, specifically in the economic field, by hindering international trade, which deprives the country of access to food, medicine and essential goods.
“The general objective of the sanctions is to hit the Venezuelan economy, promote a collapse of international trade, blocking and hindering Venezuela’s financial operations, preventing the country from accessing sources of financing, and sabotaging the purchase of food, medicine, and essential goods; all of this in order to promote an internal economic crisis, which can be used as an excuse for destabilizing actions in the political field”, states the Observatory on its website.
The investigation carried out by Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and director of the Center for Economic and Political Research, where he handled figures used by the United Nations Organization, suggests that a deterioration in health indicators became evident.
In 2018, the study refers, the Venezuelan Pharmaceutical Federation reported that the shortage of essential medicines was 85% in the country.
Other figures given by different organizations to the United Nations Organization showed that in Venezuela for the last quarter of that same year, more than 300,000 people put their health and even their lives at risk by not having access to medicines and their treatments. .
These figures included patients with different pathologies who were mostly assisted by Venezuelan Government programs that provided accessibility to medicines and treatments at low cost, if not totally free.
Thus, 80,000 patients who received retrovirals from the Venezuelan State stopped doing so, as they were unable to acquire them due to having the resources blocked in financial institutions and for having been left out of the interbank messaging system, which cut off all links with the trade in medicines and other health supplies.
Also, more than 16,000 cancer patients were directly affected by the sanctions, and the numbers of deaths due to not having access to treatments are unknown.
The figures and the risks skyrocketed when a number of more than 4 million hypertensive and diabetic patients could not acquire or receive their disease control doses free of charge.
To complete the bleak picture, some 22,000 doctors left the country, a figure that increased as the sanctions tightened. Other professionals in the sector joined this third of the Creole doctors.
This generated a very negative impact on health and increased deaths.
Data
- 22 doctors had left the country in 2018, a third of the doctors in Venezuela, not counting other health professionals who also migrated.
- Pentavalent, which protects against diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, Haemophilus influenzae type B and hepatitis B, fell to 30%.
- The polio vaccine dropped to 45% in 2018. Before, polio vaccination reached 90% coverage in the country.
- The yellow fever vaccine fell to 40% in 2018, when historical coverage exceeded 80%.
Blockade of resources left patients without medicine
Caracas. The sanctions, which also blocked the financial operations of the republic for the purchase of medicines and medical supplies, caused profound damage to the population with health effects.
Due to overcompliance with the sanctions and giving in to the extortion of the Government of Washington, Novo Banco do Brasil blocked 12.7 million dollars so that Venezuela would cancel the purchase of medical supplies and vaccines from the Pan American Health Organization.
As denounced by the executive vice president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, the blockade of resources paralyzed the purchase of “30 million syringes; 6 million vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella; 5.5 million vaccines.
The purchase of the anticovid-19 vaccines, through the WHO Covax system, was delayed due to the blocking of 10 million dollars from the UBS bank for being, supposedly, “under investigation.”
In another case, the government of Juan Manuel Santos ordered the BSN Medical laboratory not to sell medicines against malaria and malaria to Venezuela, despite the fact that the country had canceled the purchase in its entirety.
