Olivier Véran, at the Elysee Palace, January 20, 2020 (illustration) -

Alfonso Jimenez / Shutterstock / SIPA

  • Who is to blame for the delays and other cancellations of appointments observed since the opening of vaccination centers against Covid-19 for those over 75? 

  • According to Olivier Véran, mayors would have opened too many meeting slots knowing that they did not have enough doses to honor them. 

  • But several mayors were in reality seen delivering doses much lower than those they had been assigned by the state services, as

    20 Minutes

    could verify

    .

Endless wait on the phone, inability to get an answer, appointments canceled due to lack of available doses ... The many hiccups observed in France since the opening of the vaccination against Covid-19 to over 75 years has raised the discontent citizens as well as their elected representatives.

According to Olivier Véran, these problems are due to poor management of the planning of vaccination appointments by some mayors.

“The elected officials know in advance how many doses they can use this week, the one after and the one after.

The vast majority of them are familiar with this information and make sure that the slots correspond to the number of doses, ”thus affirmed the Minister of Health on Tuesday, January 19, during his visit to France Inter.

Vaccination - @olivierveran: "The elected officials know in advance how many doses they can use. Some have opened lots of appointment slots" to have more doses: "it is not possible" # le79Inter pic.twitter.com/SWUYFlURAC

- France Inter (@franceinter) January 19, 2021

"There are a few elected officials [...] who have opened lots of meeting slots by saying: 'Well anyway now that I have opened the appointments, I will be given a lot more doses", that's not it. is not possible.

One, we have no hidden stock at the national level and two, we have this principle of territorial equity, so as to allow each center to function, ”he added.

Enough to provoke the indignation of the mayor Les Républicains (LR) of La Garenne-Colombes, Philippe Juvin, who tweeted shortly after: “To say that the mayors have given appointments without thinking about the number of vaccines is a lie.

On the contrary, to authorize a vaccination center, the state required that we can do 1,000 vaccines / week!

But he only gives me 400 doses!

Let the state assume its mistakes.

"

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, Philippe Juvin details the process followed by his municipality to open a vaccination center on January 18, 2021: “On January 8, our town hall submitted to the Regional Health Agency [ARS] a plan to create a center vaccination, detailing its surface area, resources and reception capacity.

We had opted for 240 vaccinations per day by referring to the ARS indicative table on the size of the various centers, which placed it in the category of small centers.

"

On this document, which we were able to consult, the ARS in fact distinguishes three different types of vaccination spaces among the “non-prescriptive elements relating to the calibration of vaccination centers”: a “small center” with a vaccination capacity of 1,300 injections per week, a "medium center" with 3,500 doses per week, and a "large center" with a capacity of 7,800 weekly injections.

Philippe Juvin continues: “We then had several telephone exchanges and, on January 11, the Regional Health Agency confirmed to us a capacity of 1440 vaccinations per week, these being carried out over 6 days, which allows us to take 1440 appointments ”.

Here again, we were able to read the document confirming this inclusion of the ARS Ile-de-France, which clearly mentions, for the center of La Garenne-Colombes, a "number of weekly vaccinations" of "1440 vaccinations / week ".

“On January 12, we received an email from ARS telling us that the project had been selected and the need to set up for the next day a switchboard system for making appointments, which we do in time.

On January 13, we receive the prefect's opening decree from the prefect, which confirms the opening of the center, ”continues the mayor.

"We believed in a mistake"

“But on January 14, thunderclap, the state warns us that we must limit ourselves to 420 vaccinations per week.

We thought it was an error but after verification, it turns out that it was indeed the maximum planned ”adds the elected official.

Four days before the opening of the vaccination center, the prefect informs the municipality by email that it will have 420 doses for the first week of vaccination, with an opening over five days (Monday to Friday) rather than six. .

That is to say a maximum of 84 vaccinations per day against the 240 initially planned with one more day.

"The very next day, we had to stop making appointments and start calling back the people concerned to explain to them that we had to reduce our capacities, and therefore spread out (but not cancel) their vaccination", protested Philippe Juvin, who adds: “Today we are therefore at 420 vaccinations per week, without any guarantee that we will not be asked, within three weeks, to reduce to 300 or 350, for example.

"

"We made appointments because the state told us to do so"

The municipality of La Garenne-Colombes is far from the only one concerned by this type of surprises, as confirmed in

20 Minutes

Frederic Chereau, Mayor (PS) of Douai and co-chair of the health committee of the Association mayors of France (AMF): “We really had the feeling of being faced with a policy of" stop & go "without visibility at the local level.

It is very coffee to hear the ministry tell us: "You made appointments too quickly".

No !

We made appointments because the State told us to do so and to communicate with people over 75 and because the redistributing hospitals gave us the number of vaccines available.

"

“In Douai, we received the 600 doses that we expected for this week, but a colleague from the town of Le Quesnoy told me that she had only received 100 doses for the whole week.

There is not much clarity on the way in which the doses are distributed within the same region, we have no visibility per week and month on what awaits us ”, continues Frédéric Chéreau, whose Municipality had also received the ARS indicative table on the size of vaccination centers.

Contacted by

20 Minutes

, Olivier Véran's firm had not responded to our requests at the time of publishing this article.

The Minister of Health had, however, recognized, Monday, January 18, that more Moderna vaccines had been given to "territories in which the virus circulates the most, in particular the Grand-Est, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté or Nice and the Alpes Maritimes" because the epidemic does “much more damage there than elsewhere in France”.

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