The Pollensa town hall vaccination row continues to rumble on. The three opposition parties - Alternativa per Pollença, Junts Avançam and Podemos - have registered a “denuncia” with the anti-corruption office. They want Jaime Far’s office to investigate the vaccination of social welfare councillor Francisca Cerdà and the fact that she and the mayor, Tomeu Cifre, had been having PCR tests every fortnight for months and which had been paid for with public money. “Reprehensible, shameful and an abuse of authority,“ the parties say.
In speaking to people about all this, what comes across is that the matter has gone beyond Francisca Cerdà having been vaccinated and to her having lied. Having failed to answer a direct question put to her at a council meeting, she then told ‘Punt Informatiu’ that she hadn’t been vaccinated. She told an untruth. As has been said to me - how can she be trusted if she has been shown to have lied?
More has meanwhile emerged about how she came to be vaccinated, it being said that she wasn’t going to the Sant Domingo residence on a regular basis. There was a time when she did, but once the risk of infection increased, she went less often and that at the time of the vaccination her work was confined to an office and not to the interior of the residence as such.
The health minister, Patricia Gómez, has admitted that errors were made at the start of the vaccination programme. While she has suggested that this was on the first day when it wasn’t known what do with leftover doses, her explanation has rather raised a question about the whole “protocol” and who was meant to be on lists for vaccination or not.
The anti-corruption office has made clear that the vaccines are a “scarce resource” financed by public money and has added that in order to prevent “irregular vaccination”, there have to be “clear and transparent rules of the game”.
One wonders, therefore, whether the vaccination at the residence was clear. Nevertheless, there was a transparency failure and one that was evident from the fact that Francisca Cerdà didn’t tell the truth. For this reason her position is untenable.
The row has meanwhile created a rift among the parties which form the administration at the town hall. There are four of them, one of which - El Pi - has stated that it rejects and does not share public explanations given by Francisca Cerdà. Josep Marquet, the El Pi councillor, is calling for greater transparency on this matter from Tomeu Cifre.