The president-elect, Guillermo Lasso, appointed Dr. Ximena Garzón Villalba as the new head of the health portfolio in his government that will start on May 24 and confirmed that it would be an honor to have her in the government cabinet, and he announced this. Monday.

Garzón has experience in the public sector. From 2018 to the present, she has held the positions of Deputy Medical Technical Director and Deputy Director of Teaching and Research at General Hospital South Quito of the Ecuadorian Institute of Social Security (IESS) and also working as General Coordinator for Teaching Specializations at Hospital de Carlos Andrade Marin.

The Minister for the Future is a Doctor of Medicine who graduated from the Central University of Ecuador and holds a PhD in Public Health with a concentration in Occupational Health and a Postdoctoral in Occupational Health Research and Occupational Epidemiology, both from the University of South Florida (USF). ).

The doctor has also worked as a university teacher and graduate at universities in Ecuador and the United States in the Presidency of Public Health and Occupational Epidemiology, among others, and was responsible for designing the MA in Public Health and Occupational Medicine for Ecuadorian universities.

We have the greatest and noblest challenge: saving the future of an entire country. We are sure we will achieve it, and families’ health is a priority, ”the president-elect said on his Twitter account when announcing the appointment of Garzon.

Among the major challenges she faces is to rapidly advance the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination campaign at the national level. Ecuador has so far had 1.9 million doses of vaccines from three pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer-BioNtech, Sinovac and AstraZeneca, thanks to the WHO’s Covax Mechanism. The current government also said it has negotiated the purchase of 20 million doses of vaccines.

The president-elect, together with the vice president-elect, Alfredo Boreiro, has confirmed that vaccination against COVID-19 will be one of their main missions when they come to power.

Porrero supports the new administration’s offer to vaccinate 9 million people in the first 100 days of rule. (I)