The instructions are clear for the leaders of Ciudadanos in those municipalities where there have been cases of councillors or mayors who have evaded the vaccination protocol and have received a vaccination against covid.
And the instruction is that either these councillors are forced to resign, or the party will ensure the fall of the current municipal council.
That is the guideline issued by the spokesperson of the Ciudadanos in the Congress, Inés Arrimadas.
Locally, there are two cases in Orihuela and Benejúzar where the councillors for health, one PP the other PSPV, also were both vaccinated.
In both cases the recipients say that they were told by the medical authorities that there was serum that would have been wasted if not used.
There is also the situation within the Diputación de Alicante, where Ciudadanos awaits the conclusion of the investigation of the Ministry of Health into circumstance surrounding the inoculation of the provincial deputy and mayor of La Nucía, Bernabé.
What the party has done in Alicante though is to ‘remove the whip’ from the councillor, and relieve him of all responsibilities.
In Benejúzar, José Antonio García Gómez, who is himself a doctor, has already resigned as commissioner of the Torrevieja Hospital, but this would appear not to be enough for the C’s who insist that he must also resign from the municipal council.
This is also the case with Orihuela’s Jose Galiano, formerly a senior nurse at the Cabo Roig Medical Centre, who has also refused to resign, stating that as the councillor for health he is in the front line of the fight against Covid.
So why are there vaccines that are being left over.
There are, of course, a variety of reasons which could be as simple as a patient who was scheduled to receive a jab fails to show up for their appointment. That immediately creates a problem, because vaccines have a limited shelf life.
For example, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has to be administered within five days of the vial being thawed from sub-zero storage temperatures, otherwise, they go to waste, depriving someone of immunisation.
Professor Heather Draper of the Warwick Medical School told the BBC that, “If we’re talking about the Pfizer vaccine that can’t be stored for very long, then obviously a decision has to be made about it very quickly, because it can’t be kept, so It’s much better for anyone to be vaccinated, rather than waste the vaccine.”
With the current shortage in the supply of vaccines, particularly within the EU, every vaccine counts, even if only a small number are left over.
The situation regarding such short notice vaccinations is pretty much the same across Europe but it only seems to be in Spain where the authorities are taking such a firm stance.
In the Valencian Community the President, while calling on irregularly vaccinated public officials to resign from office, Ximo Puig, has said that none of them will receive a second dose of the vaccine. However since making his initial ‘ fire and brimstone’ statement a little over a week ago, in which he was quite clearly playing to the anger of the general public, he now seems to have gone very quiet on the matter relegating the subject to the bottom of his in tray as it is played out in the different municipalities of the Valencian Community.
