On the TV set of France 3 last Friday, the Mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, confirmed his vaccination strategy, which plans for four centers in the city not including the university hospitals. He also took the opportunity to express his dissatisfaction with the ARS regarding its management of vaccine doses, a criticism shared by other mayors.
According to the president of the Nice Côte-d’Azur metropolitan area, 17,000 people have registered on the metropolitan platform for vaccination, whose campaign started on December 30, beginning with nursing home residents or healthcare workers over 50 years old.
The ARS called into question
In his interview, Christian Estrosi questions the Regional Health Agency (ARS). “If I have a criticism, it’s the management of the ARS, resulting in difficulties in releasing the 8,000 vaccine doses from the university hospital pharmacy. I found it incredibly hard to get the doses out to vaccinate 300 healthcare workers over 50 years old.”
For the Mayor of Nice, this cannot continue: “I spoke with the Minister of Health, I told him that we couldn’t keep operating this way! […] We will have nearly 50 million doses by next May in France. I am not the Minister of Health, but we should be able to carry out 50,000 vaccinations per week if we have all the necessary doses,” he asserts.
Currently, the Nice university hospital keeps in reserve all the doses intended for the Alpes-Maritimes. Although the freezers are perfectly functional in cities like Cannes, Grasse, or Antibes, the ARS has not yet given its approval for distribution. The mayors of these three cities have written to the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, to request a “more optimal” vaccination strategy. “It is not coherent to stock all the doses for 1 million inhabitants in Nice. It would have been more balanced to supply all the hospitals to organize locally,” according to Jérôme Viaud, Mayor of Grasse.
The controversy of storage at the Nice university hospital
A controversy is currently circulating among the mayors of the “West” and that of the departmental capital. It is neither the first (nor will it be the last) between these “orthodox republicans” and “the audacious one” who likes to play alone.
The Mayor of Nice prefers to sidestep: “Everyone must feel responsible, the issue is the anxiety of fellow citizens waiting to be vaccinated, the storage problem is not a barrier to vaccination.” He even shows a conciliatory side and sends a small message: “This is a subject where we must be united, I call for this unity for the February holidays.”
In turn, Romain Alexandre, departmental delegate of the ARS, justifies that “the storage at the university hospital is legitimate because the first vaccines were allocated to Nice.”
