A hectic morning, of meetings, collection of information, generated in the new authorities of the Ministry of Health the article of The counterregarding the conflict of interest that affects the head of the Minsal Immunization Department, Dr. Cecilia González Caro, who has held the position since 2018, but between 2003 and 2011, she was the medical director of GlaxoSmithKline Farmacéutica Limitada, GSK, The same laboratory that between 2019 and 2021 has been awarded almost $30 billion in contracts to provide three mandatory vaccines in the health system.
Senator and doctor Juan Luis Castro will request an investigation from the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic, “and there it will have to be determined if there was no such conflict, and what were the safeguards that were taken or not, so that this person who holds a important position for the purchase of vaccines of all kinds, did not do or undo according to what seemed to him, despite the recent history that indicated him with a problem of objective disability that he should have kept.
“I consider it serious, because it is a fact that has been developing for some time, since the previous government, no information had been sent, no information was sent that would illuminate the situation. But, naturally, because of the information on her purchases by herself, in a public role of the State, with the same company where she worked, the least one expects is a declared disabilityand here there was no such thing, it went ahead as if nothing had happened, everyone looked to the ceiling, and nobody knows how this could or could not have affected the fiscal patrimony with a conflict of interest that was not explicitly indicated, ”said the parliamentarian.
For Castro, this only deepens the distrust of citizens regarding the authorities in general, “because in something as sensitive as the vaccination process, not only in COVID but in all kinds of infections, where there is a National Vaccination Program that it has been very rigorous over time; where there is a Vaccine Committee in Chile, CAVEI, which is a collegiate body within the Ministry of Health; where there are perfectly clear rules of the game; where they are multi-million dollar purchases; It is unacceptable that this type of contradiction of probity occurs as great as has been detected through this complaint by the newspaper El Mostrador”.
Although the ministry has not referred to this issue, this situation is a first headache for the incoming administration, given that it is imperative to establish under what conditions the negotiations for these million-dollar purchases were carried out and, above all, clarify whether Dr. González actually made the corresponding declaration of incapacity in these cases.
