Info Match. At the helm during the coronavirus pandemic, Professor Salomon was very exposed and very criticized.
According to our information, Jérôme Salomon will leave the post of Director General of Health, where he was appointed in January 2018 by Agnès Buzyn, the Prime Minister of Health of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term. The Ministry of Health confirms: “The Director General of Health will step down when his replacement has been appointed. He will be called to other functions but remains fully mobilized today on the management of the health crisis, which is his priority. ”
This professor of medicine, specialist in public health and epidemiology, a discipline to which he devoted his doctoral thesis, has been on the front line in the management of the pandemic since its appearance on Chinese soil at the end. of the year 2019.
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This senior official, rather classified on the left, passed through the offices of ministers Bernard Kouchner and Marisol Touraine, became a familiar figure for the general public during the first confinement in spring 2020. Almost every evening, by a widely broadcast press conference and simultaneously translated into sign language, from a room on the ground floor of the ministry on avenue de Ségur, it took stock of the progression of the virus, its devastation and knowledge about it. It detailed the number of contaminations, the number of calls to SOS Médecins, the number of occupied beds and the number of deaths.
At the heart of the controversy over masks
It was in the context of this daily report, on March 17, that he declared: “Do not wear masks. The masks are only for the sick, for medical transport, for first aid to people and for caregivers. ” A few months later, in September, heard by the Senate commission of inquiry into the Covid, he conceded a “very awkward expression of [sa] part ”, but recalled the context of“ strong tensions on the masks ”.
On the response to the pandemic, he was the “essential transmitter of the policy of the executive” in the words of deputy The Republicans Eric Ciotti, rapporteur for a fact-finding mission with very critical conclusions for the government. Like the Minister of Health Olivier Véran and the Prime Minister of the time Edouard Philippe, the scientist was the subject of a search last fall, as part of a judicial investigation opened by the Court of Justice of the Republic on the management of the crisis.
At the heart of parliamentarians’ investigations is the question of the management of strategic stocks of masks. As early as September 2018, Jérôme Salomon had been alerted by the director of Public Health France that a stock of one billion masks would be necessary to deal with an influenza pandemic. The director general of health then decided to order 50 million. “The strategic stocks have melted visibly without this arousing any real reaction,” lamented during a hearing last October Eric Ciotti. “In my opinion, it was not an alert, but bad news,” Jérôme Salomon replied in particular about the letter received in September 2018. Information that he had not reported to the cabinet of the Minister. An investigation by the Senate also revealed exchanges of emails which attest to the responsibility of Jérôme Salomon in the modifications made to a report which recommended in 2019 the constitution of a large stock of masks, an option that the director general of the health did not share. “I wish to avoid putting us in a position to take hasty decisions, which could put us in difficulty collectively, including on the budgetary level,” Jérôme Salomon had justified in an email.
While the fourth wave fueled by the delta variant threatens the country, the precise date of his departure from the general directorate of health has not yet been set. His possible successors are auditioned these days.
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