Write-in: Lenín Moreno.
Five successive health ministers, gross incompetence, corruption, favoritism, an inexistent vaccination program and a lack of empathy, what more can you ask for?
Here a summary of his management of the pandemic:
Only two months after the first Covid patient was recorded in Ecuador, the health minister, Catalina Andramuño, gave her resignation to protest lack of financing and political interference from the vice president who had been bestowed the coordination of the fight against the pandemic.
Then, in April 2020, Guayaquil, the most affected city was overwhelmed by the number of deaths, partly the consequence of a lack of preparedness from the government, shortage of Covid-test kits and medical supplies and massive cuts in health budgets (the neoliberal policies and town-planning choices of the right-wing municipality could also be blamed: namely the building in hospitals in the wealthiest neighborhoods far away from the slums of the city, a deficient drinking water networks and, possibly also, the lack of green spaces).
As a consequence, the city’s morgues were quickly overwhelmed and there were delays in the collection of corpses as well as a shortage in coffins. The response of the government was to produce in a hurry cardboard coffins (deemed as inadequate) and to build emergency cemeteries where dead persons were buried in an anarchic way. There were numerous cases of people trying to figure out where their dead relatives had been entombed by the authorities.
In the meantime, the director of the Social Security Institute had to resign for the overpriced procurement of masks, followed by the president of the Social Security Institute for the same accusation. Next, the director of the National Service for hazard management also resigned for the overpriced procurement of food kits.
In July 2020, the vice president (in charge of coordinating the fight against the Covid-19, remember), abruptly resigned to prepare his presidential bid (he ultimately didn’t run).
This was shortly before the revelation of massive corruption in the hospitals and related distribution of posts and financial resources between lawmakers of the ruling party organized by the interior minister to ensure a working majority in the parliament.
Not directly the responsibility of Moreno, but the right-wing prefect of Guayas (Carlos Luis Morales, a former soccer player) was for his part arrested for the irregular awarding of medical supplies procurement contracts to dubious companies (including one specialized in the sale of car spare parts and managed by a cabinetmaker nobody was able to locate) before suffering a heart attack and brutally dying. The family of the prefect blamed his death on him being forced to wear an electronic tagging that the doctors were allegedly unable to remove, hence preventing the use of a cardiac defibrillator; however, it is now known that this idiot caught Covid-19 and died of it.
As for the mayor of Guayaquil, she was sued for her insane decision to prevent a plane coming from Europe to pick up Spanish expatriates from landing in her city by blocking the airport runway with vehicles of the municipality.
Not to mention the case of a former president being investigated, firstly for his participation into a traffic of medical supplies with Israeli conmen, then for the murder and the attempted murder of the aforementioned conmen.
Anyway, after a brief respite, the Moreno administration embarrassed itself once more with the management of the vaccination campaign. The successor of Andramuño as minister of health, Juan Carlos Zevallos, resigned in February 2021 and flee to the United States after it had been revealed that his own mother as well as various high officials were vaccinated while not on the priority list. And that while not even nurses were vaccinated due to numerous problems in the vaccine procurement.
Zevallos’ successor, Rodolfo Farfán didn’t lasted long as he resigned after eighteen days in office, due to numerous scandals ranging from the website to get registered for vaccination being down for three days to the head of the vaccination program departing after only four days in office to protest against alleged political interference and from the leaking of a shocking video showing the 500 members of the Guayaquil and Samborondón’s Rotary Clubs lining up to get vaccinated (with a buffet at disposal and saxophonists playing in the background) to the refusal of the government to disclose the list of people having been vaccinated (it thereafter emerged such list included Moreno’s own wife as well as several of his collaborators). At the time of Farfán’s resignation, a grand total of 0.7% of the Ecuadorian population had received a dose.
Mauro Falconí, the new health minister, had to go into self-isolation one week into office as he had been tested positive to Covid-19. There, he had to elaborate a vaccination program from scratch because, as acknowledged by Moreno himself, the previous program ‘only existed in the head’ of the ousted Zevallos. Shortly thereafter, an audio was leaked in the media in which the new minister was hearing ranting against officials of his ministry about the total absence of vaccination count and yelling ‘Why the hell don’t we have data?’. Anyway, he was fired in early April 2021, after just nineteen days in office, being held liable for the chaotic vaccination campaign with damaging media reports on elderly persons having to wait up to over eight hours for the vaccine, only to be said the doses hadn’t been received.
The following health minister, Camilo Salinas (the sixth holder of the post in the Moreno administration and the fifth one since the outbreak of the pandemic just a bit more than a year before), was only there to fill the job until the end of Moreno’s term of office.
Before leaving office, Moreno somehow found an opportunity to insult his constituents in a radio program when, discussing about the corpses left in the streets of Guayaquil in April 2020 and the problems faced by families to identify the bodies, he declared that:
The same people who dumped the corpses in the streets are the ones who are complaining the government is unable to identify them
In the same broadcast, he also discussed a meeting with a woman suffering from hunger in such insulting terms he had to apologize:
A woman, quite filled with meat, told me: ‘President, we are hungry’. I told her: ‘You aren’t, madam, you look quite fat.
When Moreno left office (with only 6.3% of Ecuadorians trusting him according to a poll), only 2 million of vaccine doses had been administered; hundred days later under the new president Guillermo Lasso this number had increased to 16 million (including 10 million of first doses).
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