The Barcelona Court has decided to acquit the former Health Councillors, Josep Maria Argimon and Alba Vergés, as well as the former director general of Health of the Generalitat during the pandemic, Marc Ramentol, and the then head of the Catalan Health Service, Adrià Comella. All of them were accused of a crime of prevarication for the alleged delay in the administration of the Covid-19 vaccine to national police and civil guards stationed in Catalonia, according to the ruling accessed by Europa Press.
The court concludes that "the evidence of a will to discriminate" against these bodies has not been proven and that the decision of the Health Department to temporarily halt the vaccination of police and civil guards responded to health criteria. For this reason, it does not see any criminal offense either in the actions of Vergés, the Health Councillor at that time, or in those of the then Secretary of Public Health, Josep Maria Argimon.
The private accusations, exercised by the National Police Corps Union Justice Policial (Jupol), the Civil Guard Association Justice Civil (Jucil), the Union of Civil Guard Officers, and the Professional Police Union, demanded a penalty of 15 years of disqualification for the defendants. The Prosecutor's Office, on the other hand, chose to withdraw the charges at the end of the oral hearing.
The judicial resolution emphasizes that, in the early stages of the pandemic, the available vaccine doses were very limited, which forced the establishment of priority groups based on age or professional activity. This selection, the ruling indicates, "entailed an objective discrimination even though it was justified because the number of available vaccines was reduced."
In the same vein, the court explains that it was essential to "necessarily" choose which patients were vaccinated first, relying on technical-health parameters, even assuming that some at-risk groups could initially be left out of the immunization campaign.
The suspension of vaccination for police
The Barcelona Court reasons that, once a higher incidence of Covid-19 was confirmed in terms of mortality and hospitalizations among those over 60 years old, the interruption of vaccination for agents below that age "obeyed technical-health reasons" and, therefore, cannot be considered unjust from a criminal perspective.
At this point, the court considers "especially significant" that the criterion followed by the Ministry of Health coincided with that being applied in the main international health organizations. It also recalls that in a meeting held on March 22, 2021, the Interterritorial Council already leaned, although combined with the vaccination of essential groups, to prioritize the age group of over 60 years.
Along with the shortage of doses, the ruling highlights that side effects associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine were detected, which was the one being administered to civil guards and national police before the first suspension. That context conditioned the vaccination strategy adopted by the Catalan health authorities.
The ruling considers it relevant that, when it was decided to resume vaccination with AstraZeneca, all the available 'stock' was exclusively allocated to people over 60 years old. Likewise, when vaccination was carried out in execution of the precautionary measure agreed upon after the unions' complaint, the Moderna vaccine was used and not AstraZeneca. For the court, this evidences that the priority was to protect those over 60 years old and to wait for new batches of other vaccines to later immunize police officers and civil guards.
Consequently, although the Barcelona Court admits that there was a "notable difference" in the vaccination percentage between the group of Mossos d'Esquadra and local police in Catalonia, on one hand, and the members of the Civil Guard and the National Police Corps, on the other, it concludes that this disparity responded to health reasons. Therefore, it rules out that the decision can be classified as arbitrary or unfair in legal terms.