In addition to the acquisition processes, information on cabin registration and the national vaccination plan will also not be available to the public within the next three years.
The Ministry of Health of El Salvador (MINSAL) declared the total reservation of information related to the application and purchase of vaccines against covid-19, so that it closes the access to these data for periods between 3 and 5 years, according to a document consulted this Wednesday by Efe.
the MINSAL Reserved Information Index, Updated on March 11 on its transparency site, notes that the information of the “Processes for the acquisition of vaccines against SARS-Cov-2” will be subject to reservation for 5 years.
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Public access to the “National SARS-Cov-2 Vaccination Deployment Plan” and the “Register of SARS-Cov-2 Vaccination Booths” will be subject to reservation for three years.
The responsible units, according to the document, are the Procurement and Contracting Unit, the National Directorate of First Level of Care, the National Biological Center (Cenabi) and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (CAPI). ).
The Health portfolio justified the action in letter D of article 19 of the Law on Access to Public Information, which indicates that it is confidential information “that clearly endangers life, safety or health of any person “.
The Health portfolio justified the action in letter D of article 19 of the Law on Access to Public Information. Photo: EDH / Archive
This law states that confidential information is that “access is expressly restricted in accordance with this Law, on grounds of general interest for a specified period and for justified reasons.”
This is not the only information related to the covid-19 pandemic that MINSAL has kept secret.
According to the portal of Transparency, the “Processes for the acquisition of vaccines against SARS-Cov-2” will be under reserve for 5 years. Photo: Courtesy Transparencia.gob.sv
In June 2020, it declared the total reservation of the documentation generated by the National Public Health Laboratory “containing information related to the mechanisms for taking, processing and disseminating test results for covid-19, addressed to the different departments of the Ministry health “.
Another piece of information declared under reservation by MINSAL, since President Nayib Bukele came to the Executive, is the purchase of advertising and the document “The National Health Plan”, including annexes, according to the aforementioned index.
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El Salvador has received at least 105 thousand 80 doses of covid-19 vaccines from the pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca (53 thousand 600) and Pfizer (51 thousand 480), of which 85 thousand 80 were given by the COVAX system of the ‘World Health Organization (WHO).
The Government of El Salvador is betting on “herd immunity” to deal with the pandemic and the Ministry of Health aims to vaccinate 4.5 million Salvadorans.
El Salvador officially registers 63 thousand 766 infected people, of which 61,009 have recovered and 1,990 have died.
Reactions to information blocking
Transparency experts say this affects people’s right to be informed about issues related to their health and lives.
“This information has no legal basis to be classified as confidential,” Wilson Sandoval, coordinator of the Anti-Corruption Legal Advice Center (ALAC-Fon), told The Daily Today.
According to Sandoval, it is not enough to cite Article 19 of the LAIP. The government must justify this and this must respect the law, comply with reasonableness (prove that the reservation really protects the rights it claims to protect) and temporality (explain why Salvadorans are safer by not being able to disclose this information for the given period).
Xenia Hernández, director of the DTJ Foundation, condemned this reservation and recalled that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has called for information regarding COVID-19, testing and vaccines to be public and even unofficial. That is, it is available even if it has not been requested by the public.
“They should be proactively reporting because they are high-relevance data so that pandemic management has more impact and outcome,” he said.
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