Low on shots and overwhelmed by the coronavirus, a country with one of the highest COVID-19 death rates is taking a novel approach to fighting vaccine corruption: publishing the name of everyone who gets a shot.
For those who want to know if a friend, neighbor or member of Paraguay’s political elite are among the 423,000 people with an inoculation, the answer is just a few clicks away on the Health Ministry’s website. There a public database lists the person’s name, place of vaccination, type of vaccine and number of doses. Scroll through and you’ll see ex-President Fernando Lugo got his first shot of Sputnik V on May 19 and Carlitos Vera, a well known Paraguayan comedian, received the Covaxin jab.
"It’s a tool for citizen oversight,” Lida Sosa, a deputy health minister, said in an interview. "There were people who looked at the list and reported individuals who got vaccinated who” weren’t eligible.