The mayor of the town of Riudoms (Tarragona) Sergi Pedret, has come under considerable criticism after jumping the queue for a vaccination.

He’s not alone because two other mayors, a man and wife, from small towns in the north of Alicante, also received the vaccine when they shouldn’t have. Their party (PSOE) is looking into taking punitive action against them.

Sr. Pedret, said that the head of the medical centre carrying out the vaccination campaign upon health workers had contacted him and said that they had doses left over and rather than wasting them, offered him the chance to receive one. In fact, one of his councillors also received a ‘spare’ jab.

“I’m not somebody to tell medical staff who to vaccinate or not,” he said in his defence, adding that he was simply following the instructions of the person in charge of the vaccination session. He also pointed out that he had to rush and get down to the centre because in a question of hours the spare doses would have been worthless and would have been thrown away.

As for the two other mayors, the Mayor of El Verger explained that on Friday that he had received a call from the medical centre to tell him that they had seven doses left over from vaccinating the medical staff because two of them were in quarantine, two had flu and three preferred not to have the jab.

“In all good faith we went round there, my wife and I, who is the Mayor of the neighbouring town of Els Poblets, and they gave us the jabs,” he said, adding, “furthermore the other five spare jabs went to police officers belonging to the Policía Local and the Guardia Civil, who were on duty at the time.”

(News: Riudoms, Tarragona, Valencia)