He was one of the faces of the Covid pandemic in France. Jérôme Salomon, Director General of Health, is leaving his post to go abroad. He joined the World Health Organization (WHO), after a mixed record on his crisis management. Jérôme Salomon “will become deputy director general” of the WHO as of Monday, April 17, announced in a press release the institution based in Geneva and linked to the UN. Asked by AFP, the Ministry of Health confirmed that it had indeed “left” the Directorate General of Health, without specifying when. Jérôme Salomon has been at the head of this organization since 2018, a function usually little seen by the general public.
The mission of the DGS: to concretely implement the decisions taken by the State in terms of health. Reporting directly to the Ministry of Health, it is rarely called upon to make major announcements. But, from the beginning of 2020, the Covid changed the situation. The spotlight is on Jérôme Salomon, who became one of the incarnations of the health crisis alongside the Ministers of Health at the time, Agnès Buzin, then, very quickly, Olivier Véran. An epidemiologist by training, Jérôme Salomon knows the mysteries of power well. He held the position of adviser to former minister Marisol Touraine between 2013 and 2015, then to Emmanuel Macron during the presidential campaign.
With the Covid-19 crisis, this man in the shadows continues press conferences to detail the evolution of the health situation. In the early days, he was responsible for the regular count of deaths and hospitalizations.
Subsequently, it was also the DGS which communicated widely on the anti-Covid vaccination campaigns, once these were deployed on a large scale from 2021. For Jérôme Salomon, this highlighting was accompanied by strong criticism. A committee of senators thus accused him at the end of 2020 of being partly responsible for the lack of masks in the early stages of the pandemic, and of having sought to conceal his role in the shortage. The government then publicly defended Jérôme Salomon, ensuring that his resignation was not on the program. “He is devoted body and soul to protecting the health of the French,” assured Gabriel Attal, then government spokesman.
Sanitary Mercato
But this defense had not convinced all the observers of the world of health, like the doctor Christian Lehmann, columnist of the pandemic in the newspaper Release. Jérôme Salomon “made the decision to let the stock of protective equipment disappear, and tried to ensure that this decision could not be blamed on him”, he regretted in his chronicle of the time. Already in July 2021, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health had declared that Jérôme Salomon, professor of medicine, would be “called to other functions” soon, once his replacement was appointed. More than a year later, the departure of Jérôme Salomon embodies, in its unfolding, a certain vagueness at the head of several French health institutions such as the French public health agency, which has only just taken on a new director after months of holiday, Caroline Semaille.
The Ministry of Health was not in a position on Monday to indicate who would succeed Jérôme Salomon, whose departure had been given for almost two years. He specified that a name should be announced at a future Council of Ministers. For his part, the government’s ex-Mr. Covid will oversee a vast portfolio of technical programs within the WHO, covering in particular HIV, sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis, malaria, mental health issues as well as diseases heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
The WHO has also appointed four other personalities to the management team of its headquarters in Geneva, some of whom had already been announced a few months ago. These appointments follow the reappointment last year of Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as head of the agency. Doctor Jeremy Farrar, who headed the British research foundation Wellcome Trust, will notably become the organization’s chief scientist from May 8.