PARIS. “I got vaccinated, but I’m almost an exception.” Giacco Mulieri has been working in France for fifteen years. The Roman surgeon sees how difficult the race for immunity is among hospital staff across the Alps. Although the category has been a priority since the vaccination campaign began three months ago, just over a million French doctors and nurses have volunteered. About 30 percent of the total. Less than in Italy where the share has already exceeded 1.4 million.
“The other night a nurse told me: ‘I will never get vaccinated'”, Mulieri, 46, who alternates periods between two hospitals, one in Bordeaux and another near Toulouse, tells on the phone. The Ministry of Health wrote a letter in the form of an appeal: “I ask you to do it, for yourselves, for those around you, for the French,” said Olivier Véran. “Our collective safety and capacity is at stake. of our health system to hold up “.
The appeal was unsuccessful, indeed vaccinations have slowed down in recent weeks due to the controversy over AstraZeneca. “The health authorities – continues the Italian surgeon – do not take coercive measures, they only make a mild recommendation. It is part of French culture: to leave free will ”. The phenomenon is not entirely new. Poor compliance with the flu vaccine was already known among medical personnel. “For me it is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath,” comments Mulieri who often tries to convince his NoVax colleagues. “They are scared by the fact that the vaccine came too soon, they say they don’t want to be guinea pigs,” he says. And then he blurts out: “These are ignorant arguments. This scientific prodigy is a great fortune, we should all rush to get vaccinated ”.
Mulieri grew up in a family of doctors, his father was head physician at the Regina Margherita hospital in Rome. “France – he comments – will never pass a law for the obligation of vaccination and if it happened many of my colleagues would get sick in protest”. The percentage of NoVax, he explains, is lower in the resuscitation wards. “Because they see the dead, and therefore overcome mistrust”. The farther you go from the Covid trench, the less you join. Doctors are less skeptical, while resistance is stronger among nurses.
The government under fire
Mulieri, who is in the union of resuscitators anesthetists, defines himself as suffering from “chronic pessimism”. And it hasn’t healed in recent weeks with France again on alert for the epidemic curve. He lashes out at what he calls “misinformation” about the current health situation. “The third wave term is wrong. With the first wave of spring we started from scratch, then we climbed to a peak, and then we went back down thanks to the complete lockdown ”. According to the Italian doctor, the second wave is still ongoing. “We are in the wake of the curve that started in autumn which never really went down”. Like many scientists, he is critical of the French government, which in November adopted a semi-lockdown and since December has lifted many restrictions by focusing on a curfew. “In January it was necessary to give the coup de grace to this second wave. And instead Macron, between health and the economy, has chosen the economy ”.
For five months, the influx of Covid patients has never really dropped. “When it began to descend, the impact of the mutated forms of the virus began.” From his observatory he has no doubts: the English variant is not only more contagious, but it is also more aggressive. “There has been an increase in patients ending up in resuscitation and when they are intubated it is almost impossible to ventilate them.” Although there is still no scientific consensus on the increased lethality rate of the mutated virus, for Mulieri it is already a certainty. “We who are on the front line see it every day. And in the coming weeks it will also emerge in the statistics ”. Half of the new resuscitation patients have an average age of less than fifty years. “We see 20-year-olds arriving without pathologies. In Bordeaux we welcomed two nine-year-olds ”.
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The risk of schools
The decision to leave schools open, he adds, is wrong. “The so-called health protocols are not respected,” says Mulieri, father of two children aged six and eight. “In my son’s class there are thirty children in twenty square meters. There are no unpaired classes or disposable counters like in Italy “. A few days ago the government has declared numerous regions red zone, including those of Paris, Lille and Nice. But even in these areas, pupils continue to study face-to-face, excluding high schools where there is a fifty percent dad obligation. “From this point of view, Italy has certainly been wiser. I understand the right to education, I am a parent too, but we know that schools encourage the spread of viruses “.
Macron himself refuses to use the word confinement, and there are no limits for exits up to ten kilometers from the home. Mulieri blurts out: “These are restrictions on rose water. The only wave the government decided to fight was the first. Now we pay the price for a very bland attitude. Difficult months await us ”. The epidemic runs even if it does not explode. “The situation is heterogeneous between the regions. In my hospital in Toulouse we have three Covid patients while in the one in Bordeaux there are none at the moment ”.
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The Minister of Health had promised a few months ago to increase the number of beds in intensive care to 12 thousand. “All talk. You can buy materials, respirators, but then who makes them work? ” rhetorically asks Mulieri who speaks of “utopia”. “Critically ill need ultra-specialized doctors. It takes years to train them ”. Already in normal times, explains the surgeon, there is a chronic shortage in French hospitals. “We are often forced to bring in Moroccan, Tunisian and Algerian resuscitators. But now they are no longer found either “.
Mulieri sees the risk of slowly getting used to the daily bulletins with hundreds of deaths. “There is also a collateral mortality that is never mentioned. All cancer patients who no longer go to chemo or those who experience delays in diagnosis. And the prognosis has also worsened for those who have heart attacks, strokes or simply accidents on the road ”. Last summer, says the doctor, he had an influx of patients with appendicitis who were already peritonitis. “It is the effect of spring when people stopped coming to the hospital. There were entire wards deserted. It made an impression. And when they returned they had more advanced diseases ”.
People’s outlook on doctors’ heroism has also changed. Last year, these days, the French applauded the efforts of doctors and nurses from their balconies. Now a certain annoyance is emerging over the calls for new restrictions coming from those on the front line. “When we see restaurateurs complaining about the closure of the premises we are upset. I understand people who lose their jobs, but we fight against a new monster every day ”. The hospital staff is partly resigned. “We have become accustomed to seeing this subtle, aggressive disease that affects everyone, without there being a real criterion, perhaps due to a genetic predisposition that we ignore. It’s a lottery ”.
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