He was the government's coronavirus mister at the start of the crisis.
But also the voice and the face of bad news for millions of French people and for weeks when he announced the sad daily record every night at a press conference.
Jérôme Salomon will soon leave his post of Director General of Health, "called to other functions," said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health on Wednesday.
The date of his departure has not yet been set, pending the appointment of his successor, was still content to explain this same source, confirming information from Paris Match. The Ministry of Health confirms that “the Director General of Health will step down when his replacement has been appointed. He will be called to other functions but remains fully mobilized today on the management of the health crisis, which is his priority. "
This professor of medicine, specialist in public health and epidemiology, a discipline to which he devoted his doctoral thesis, found himself on the front line in the management of the pandemic Appointed in January 2018 to this post, this professor of medicine had become a familiar figure of the French, by unveiling from the start of the health crisis, in spring 2020, the epidemic data during a daily press point relayed by the news channels.
Its management targets criticism
Professor Salomon has not been spared by the flood of criticism targeting the executive since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic.
In a report at the end of 2020, the Senate commission of inquiry “directly” attributed the shortage of masks at the start of the epidemic “to the decision, taken in 2018 by the Director General of Health, not to renew the stock of masks surgical ”, even if“ it is also the consequence of previous choices ”.
To read also "Before knowing, we do not know": Jérôme Salomon defends the French management of the Covid-19
As part of a judicial investigation opened by the Court of Justice of the Republic on the management of the crisis, a search was carried out in mid-October at his home, as well as at the former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, the Minister of Health Olivier Véran or Agnès Buzyn, who held this position before him.
Before that, in October 2012, this scientific and media figure of the pandemic was dismissed in troubled conditions by the Pasteur Institute while he held the position of head of the international division.
