Italian region of Lombardy authority fires all executives due to chaos in vaccination procedure

Lombardy Governor Attilio Fontana said Monday that he was going to oust the executives of a regional agency in relation to the chaos that has hit the region’s COVID-19 vaccination roll-out. The northern region, which was the hardest hit by the first wave of the coronavirus, has performed badly with respect to other parts of Italy in getting people vaccinated.

Furthermore, at the weekend the campaign was hit by a failure of the IT and text-message systems run by the ARIA agency to inform people that they have an appointment for a jab. As a result, in the city of Cremona on Sunday the number of people to turn up for jabs was only a fraction of the number of doses available. “I have asked the members of the ARIA board to resign,” Fontana said.

“If they don’t, I will remove the board and put Director General Lorenzo Gubian in charge of the agency.

“The critical situations like those that occurred at the weekend give a distorted image of the results we have achieved”.

ANSA