After three weeks of rest following an illness, health minister Paulette Lenert (LSAP), returned to a packed agenda: the vaccination campaign, easing of restrictions, communication difficulties and controversy around nursing homes.

PP & NL: Criticisms have been made of your overly “cautious” management of the vaccination campaign, particularly with regard to the management of vaccine stocks. A “lawyer's” management, according to some...

Paulette Lenert: No, on the contrary, we did not take a lawyer's approach! We relied on our experts. What we follow is first of all the recommendations of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), and then those of our scientific council.

We have, as all countries have, a scientific committee, an upper council for infectious diseases (CSMI), established by law, and we follow it. These people were appointed by the government at some point, long before I arrived. They are the ones who have this advisory role. It would seem strange to me to distance myself from them...

But some experts considered that the length of the interval between the two doses of vaccine could have been lengthened and that the campaign should show more flexibility...

On this subject, you will easily find other people who will tell you something else. That's the thing about this pandemic, you open any newspaper and you find articles with more nuanced opinions, both at the expert level and at the commentator level!

In addition, in Luxembourg, we look a lot at our neighbouring countries. And it is true that there is not always one and the same approach. The different scientists do not always have the same position, which makes the task even more difficult. We don't really know where we stand. And in the end, everyone has to figure it out.

How do you cut through all of that information?

If you start - if you look at France, our scientific council, counterpart X or Y - you don't stop. You have to rely on something to make decisions. And for that, we have institutions, advisory bodies. So, we follow them. This seems normal to me. It would be hard for me, as a minister, to deviate from what the CSMI recommends... It would be a stretch to say to them: ‘You are instituted and appointed to these positions, but we rely on someone who is not...’

Then there are policy decisions to be made, of course. But to vary a timeframe against a recommendation that has been given to us, that would still seem to me to be quite bold.

The comparison with other countries has not always been flattering when it comes to starting the vaccination campaign...

In the beginning, we were slower. Now we are faster. We were very fast on other things. In this pandemic, if you look, you always find the grass is greener somewhere else... But if you look at it overall, I think we did not do badly.

It's true that at the beginning, and it wasn't a legal attitude, it was just prudent, we didn't know if the deliveries would come or not. And we waited a little while to find out whether we could rely on them or not, before we started to not fully retain the second doses. I understand that waiting a little while to be sure is a rather prudent attitude.

But some countries, by being more flexible, have been able to protect more people more quickly with the first dose...

If you look abroad, particularly France, there were at one point a lot of appointments that had to be cancelled. And that's also cause for grumbling, because I think something that people don't take very well is when you give them a clear direction and then you have to back down. So we've always tried to put in place what we're more or less sure we can deliver in terms of timelines.

The fourth installment of this interview will be published on paperjam.lu, Wednesday at 5 p.m.

This article was originally published in French on Paperjam.lu. It has been translated and edited for Delano.