Provea always receives calls from people denouncing situations that violate their rights. In these last few weeks, we’ve been receiving reports of the current vaccination process against COVID-19 from different parts of the country. Even though it was an outcry shared by much of the population, the vaccination schedule according to sectors prioritized by their vulnerability situation still isn’t known.
The increase of cases and the absence of conditions guaranteeing Venezuelans’ health increase the anguish for accessing the vaccine. Nevertheless, the lack of information and the nonexistence of a technical protocol regulating the actions of officials not only increase people’s bewilderment but also the disorder and improvisation with which people are being immunized.
We’ve received reports from Caracas that depending on which center and the day a person can approach it and receive the first dose. In this way, 20-year-old people are being vaccinated along with octogenarians, with average times in line going from 5 to 12 hours waiting, in concentrations that increase the risks of infection. There’s less flexibility in other cities in the country because there’s less
amount of doses available. In town centers of densely populated cities such as Maracaibo and Barquisimeto they’re only vaccinating people registered in the Patria System – a social control program – who are summoned by a text message to their mobile phones. Even being summoned for a specific day doesn’t guarantee that the person will have access to the dose, since there are more people called than the vaccines available for that session. We demand that these errors be solved, due to the fact that the right to health doesn’t allow improvisation in implementing public policies.
In the context of the current crisis in Venezuela, human rights organizations maintain a continuous effort to record and document the systematic violations of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the population in order to accompany the victims and give visibility to these violations before the national and international community.
In this sense, the Crisis in Venezuela bulletin emerges as a weekly space in which, as a human rights movement, we bring together the situations that currently reflect the humanitarian crisis that Venezuela is going through.
The Crisis in Venezuela newsletter ESPAÑOL | ENGLISH
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