“Today, for example, firefighters are prohibited from exercising, all of this is not serious”, regretted the leader of the deputies Les Républicains, Olivier Marleix, questioned Wednesday, July 13, on Sud Radio. While the reintegration of caregivers is part of the fights led by the RN and France Insoumise, the elected LR calls for his part the government to question at least on the extent of the vaccination obligation for professionals. “An unvaccinated firefighter today we need him in the field”he estimated.
According to the CGTs of the SDIS (Departmental Fire and Rescue Service), at the beginning of October, around 140 professional firefighters were suspended for lack of vaccination against Covid and around 5,000 volunteer firefighters. Concretely, this would represent barely more than 2% of the total workforce. However, this figure should be taken with caution: the count of suspended professional firefighters only corresponds to people who have received an administrative notification of suspension. Thus, some non-vaccinated firefighters may not be counted simply because they are under another status at the time of the census, such as on sick leave for example.
Conversely, if the figure of 5,000 suspended volunteer firefighters may seem substantial, he wishes to specify that this is a question of counting firefighters who have not communicated their vaccination status. However, some volunteer firefighters may not come forward to their employer simply because they are not available to go on an intervention. This “contact break“, therefore automatically leads to their suspension. On the other hand, these figures vary greatly from one region to another. In Paris, for example, firefighters, under military status, are almost all vaccinated, according to the CGT While in the South-East of France, the vaccination of firefighters was a little more complicated, reports the union.
According to the CGT, the absence of these suspended firefighters has little impact on the ground. More specifically, even if these suspensions may have accentuated difficulties locally, the union recalls that the lack of resources among firefighters existed before these sanctions. Thus, according to Sébastien Delavoux, spokesperson for the CGT SDIS, “the needs are disproportionate to the number of suspended agents”. The trade unionist estimates that it would be necessary to recruit several thousand additional professional firefighters to deal with the difficulties. The CGT does not necessarily call for the reinstatement of suspended firefighters who “could create tension as a number of agents have been vaccinated due to the constraint of the suspension”.
The union instead calls for a complete rethinking of civil security in France and denounces “a system that no longer works“. An example: the average response time for firefighters continues to lengthen. According to statistics from the Ministry of the Interior, it already takes two minutes longer than four years ago to see the arrival of the first rescue vehicle.
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