The milestone of one million French people vaccinated will be "largely reached by the end of the month" of January, said the Minister of Health on Monday morning, while the vaccination opens to all people aged 75 and over and people at very high risk.
"With the acceleration of the vaccination campaign in nursing homes, we will have largely reached the million French people vaccinated by the end of the month," Olivier Véran told the press after visiting the vaccination center of the Grenoble University Hospital where he himself practiced as a neurologist.
On Sunday at 7.45 p.m., the number of people vaccinated since December 26 stood at 422 127, elderly people living in nursing homes, caregivers, firefighters, home helpers over 50 years old or presenting comorbid factors.
"Not everyone can be vaccinated in a day"
As in response to the many criticisms of the French vaccine strategy, Olivier Véran made a point of clarifying: “not everyone can be vaccinated in a day or a week, not because the logistics would not follow, but because the the challenge is to have enough doses to vaccinate all French people ”.
“Each time doses arrive, we make them immediately available, we open meeting slots for the French.
We are in a tight flow, it is our strategy, it is the strategy of all the countries that vaccinate ”, he argued.
However, in other countries of the European Union which opened vaccination such as France on December 26, the rate of injection is much faster.
While these certain elected officials consider the number of vaccines delivered to their territories insufficient, Olivier Véran stepped aside, ensuring that they all knew how many doses they had.
"We have given in each territory the precise number of doses delivered this week, next week, the week after and the week after, to give readability and visibility to all the teams in the vaccination centers", he asserted.
And to add: "If the question is the
more I program people, the more vaccines will be given to me to the detriment of neighboring territories
, the answer is no".
15 million vaccinated at the end of June
There is, however, an exception to this rule: in “the territories in which the virus circulates the most, in particular the Grand-Est, Bourgogne Franche-Comté or Nice and the Alpes-Maritimes […], we have given more vaccines with the Moderna vaccine, because there the epidemic is causing much more damage than in Grenoble or elsewhere in France, ”he detailed.
The Minister of Health, who invites "patience", targets 2.4 million vaccinations by the end of February "and perhaps 4 million if other vaccines ordered were to be approved".
"Our goal is to vaccinate 15 million French people by the end of June", for his part recalled a little earlier, on CNews, the Minister for Industry.
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Agnès Pannier-Runacher assured that the delay in delivery of vaccines from Pfizer / BioNTech will be made up "at the end of the 1st quarter".
On Friday, the two laboratories announced that they would not be able to provide the quantity of doses to which they had committed.
Faced with the anger of European countries, criticized for the slowness of their vaccination campaign, Pfizer and BioNTech revised their forecasts the next day.
"The schedule provides for a drop in delivery of 140,000 doses this week and, from next week, we will have 520,000 weekly deliveries," as initially planned, argued the Minister.
"Pfizer guarantees us something almost painless, but we will be vigilant," she added.
