Bernardo Vazquez
04/27/2021 1:39 PM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 04/27/2021 1:39 PM
Health Minister
Carla Vizzotti met with authorities from the Pfizer laboratory
on Monday, April 12
and asked for details to advance in the acquisition of vaccines against Covid-19.
The meeting gives credit to the statements of the presidential advisor Cecilia Nicolini, who this Tuesday morning acknowledged that "negotiations with Pfizer have been resumed", after an agreement was frustrated at the end of 2020.
Fifteen days ago,
Vizzotti received Nicolás Vaquer and Juan Ignacio Romano, the general manager and the general director of corporate affairs of the Argentine subsidiary
of the American laboratory
,
on the second floor of the Ministry of Health
.
In the meeting, at 16 on that April 12,
Mauricio Monsalvo
, secretary of administrative management of the ministry, also participated.
The data comes from the National Registry of Hearings published by the Ministry of the Interior, accessed by
Clarín
, and which portrays the meeting between the health authorities and the company's representatives.
The reason for the hearing is very specific.
"They discussed the acquisition of SARS-COV-2 vaccines", is summarized
in the official text.
The record of the meeting between Vizzotti and Pfizer authorities, on April 12.
"Carla Vizzotti along with the whole team have resumed negotiations with Pzifer
to understand the situation, generate some changes and move forward with a possible contract, "
Nicolini had declared in the morning
in Futurock. The official, who was part of the trips to Moscow at the end of last year were closed the agreement to buy doses of Sputnik V, considered that "
negotiations sometimes suffer
impasses
, slow down, then resume
", while clarifying that "in no case are they closed." He objected in this regard: "It has there must be an agreement of the parties ".
From
Casa Rosada they assure that the negotiations with Pfizer never stopped
since the Covid-19 vaccines began to be developed, beyond the fact that at the beginning of February the then Minister of Health
Ginés González García had declared in the Chamber of Deputies that the laboratory tried to close the agreement a "series of unacceptable conditions"
. "Pfizer behaved very badly, the intolerance was tremendous," González García had declared then, who two weeks later would leave his post as a result of the scandal that arose when the VIP Vaccination that operated in the Ministry of Health was revealed.
Internally, it
did not sit well with Nicolini using the verb "retake" to refer to the negotiations with Pfizer
.
Somehow, executive sources believe, that word led to the interpretation that at some point the talks stopped.
"It was not like that, there was always dialogue, as with all laboratories," they say.
In fact,
there was a standstill in the negotiations between Pfizer and the Government, especially in what has to do with the official records of meetings
.
That pause in the dialogue occurred between December and April, precisely at the stage when doses of Sputnik V from Russia began to arrive and then vaccines from AstraZeneca-Oxford and the Chinese Sinopharm.
The last formal meeting between Health authorities and Pfizer had been on December 22, 2020
, when Monsalvo received Alejandro Chevalier, the company's Legal Director, into the ministry, in a meeting in which Emiliano Suaya, technical undersecretary, also participated. of the Secretary of Legal and Technical, the other portfolio that sits at the small table of the negotiations between the laboratories and the Ministry of Health. "Acquisition of the Covid-19 vaccine", had also been the reason for the meeting that was reported
Previously
, on September 11 and 23, Monsalvo and Chevalier had discussed the advances
that were then being carried out in the development of the Pfizer vaccine, which was not yet in operation.
On the 4th of that month
there had been another official meeting, with Ginés González García, Vizzotti, then secretary of Access to Health, and Vaquer.
At that time, the meetings were frequent, since on
September 1
Ginés and Vaquer had talked with each other, repeating previous meetings
on July 16 and June 29
.
In the middle of them, on July 10, it was President Alberto Fernández who received Vaquer and Argentine scientist Fernando Pollack in Olivos.
The return to negotiations with Pfizer occurs in a context of low access to vaccines, mainly to shipments that the Executive expects to arrive from AstraZeneca. "
We are waiting for AstraZeneca to begin to fulfill commitments with Latin America," said the President last week
. The development of the Anglo-Swedish laboratory had been the main one that the Government had targeted last year. According to the estimated schedule contained in the contract with This laboratory, for which
the country paid for 60% of the vaccines in advance
, the first batch should have arrived in March, the second should have been in April, and so on the subsequent ones, month by month, until July.