How to best organize the vaccination campaign against Covid-19?
The coming week is already crucial for the government.
The announced schedule is tight to be able to vaccinate part of the population "at the end of December beginning of January" as announced by the President of the Republic last Tuesday, even if, in our columns, the Minister of Health Olivier Véran seemed to want to give time to time by declaring "not to feel constrained by an end of year agenda.
My only obligation is the efficacy and safety of the doses ”.
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This extraordinary campaign must overcome a number of obstacles.
First, determine who should be vaccinated first.
First elements of response this Monday morning, because the High Authority of Health, which advises the government, will say which are the priority audiences.
"Elderly people in nursing homes and nursing staff will be part of this category", indicates to us, by requesting anonymity, a member of this organization.
A "targeted" strategy
But we already know certain aspects of the campaign, following a note sent to us this Sunday evening by the Ministry of Health.
“Initially, the vaccination strategy will be targeted.
We will receive the doses gradually, which will lead us to vaccinate as a priority the people who need it most.
It remains to be seen how many people will actually be affected by this first round of vaccination.
1.5 million, as estimated by the JDD in its edition this Sunday?
Information which this Sunday evening was not confirmed by the executive.
The DGS note also specifies "the vaccination will be spread out in France during the year 2021. The different vaccines that we will have will indeed obtain a marketing authorization on different dates over the months. , depending on the dates of submission of dossiers to the European Medicines Agency ”.
In other words… the vaccination campaign will look more like a marathon than a sprint.
Storage at -70 ° C is complex
It is also for this, specifies the note “that the Ministry of Health, under the authority of the Prime Minister and through an inter-ministerial taskforce, is actively working on logistical issues”.
It refers in particular to the storage problems of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine.
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“The marketing of a vaccine stored at - 70 ° C is an obvious source of complexity in France as in other European countries.
This forces us to plan for different deployment strategies depending on the types of vaccines.
We have already purchased the materials needed to store these vaccines.
"
The ultimate puzzle, and not the least, is the colossal logistical challenge that this campaign represents.
The European Commission, responsible for purchasing vaccines from laboratories, has made six commitments since August with, in chronological order: AstraZeneca, Sanofi Pasteur GSK, Janssen Pharmaceutica, Pfizer BioNTech, CureVac and Moderna.
The doses - 1.38 billion in total for the first phase - will be distributed among the countries of the Union in proportion to their populations.
France should recover 90 million.
The entire logistics sector is on a war footing but it is clear that the intervention chain is still far from being framed.