Fewer than 30,000 liberal doctors, mainly general practitioners, volunteered to vaccinate in their offices from February 25, according to the Ministry of Health.
As a result, it will only use half of the 550,000 doses delivered by AstraZeneca.
According to the Directorate General of Health (DGS), “28,844 liberal doctors were fitted with a referral pharmacy for the first delivery of doses reserved for the city”.
Officially warned on Friday, practitioners had until 11 p.m. on Wednesday to come forward to a pharmacist in order to receive a 10-dose vial of the AstraZeneca vaccine next week.
The call was mainly followed by general practitioners, who represent nearly 97% of registrants.
Their main union therefore sees the glass half full: "This is a good result given the very short time available to us and the information circulating on the efficacy and side effects of this vaccine", recalls Jacques Battistoni, president. by MG France.
Pharmacies want to collect doses
But pharmacists, on the contrary, see the glass half empty, with more than 250,000 doses that have not found a taker.
"It's a shame to have all these doses in reserve, but the doctors could not all spare half a day to vaccinate ten patients in a row", notes Philippe Besset, president of the FSPF union, convinced that "is missing vaccination in pharmacies, in support of doctors ”.
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A point of view shared by his counterpart from Uspo, Gilles Bonnefond, who suggests "giving pharmacies" these 250,000 doses, which would thus be injected "in two, three days".
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This unused stock could have been even higher, if the laboratory had delivered 700,000 units, as initially planned.
But "the manufacturer AstraZeneca has announced a reallocation over time of the volumes delivered", indicates the DGS, ensuring that "this decrease will be caught up from the deliveries at the end of February".