Stop for AstraZeneca.
After Ireland, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and several Scandinavian countries, Germany, Italy, Spain and France announced Monday the suspension "as a precaution" of vaccination with this product developed by the laboratory born from the merger of Swedish Astra and British Zeneca.
At issue: several suspected cases of side effects identified around the world.
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The French decision is not final.
A European opinion is thus expected this Thursday on the advisability of continuing, stopping or continuing to evaluate the side effects linked to the vaccination.
The stake is enormous.
Because in recent weeks, in France, there has been a real rise in the power of AstraZeneca stamped injections, the distribution of which began on February 6 throughout the country.
To measure the importance of the Anglo-Swedish serum in the French strategy, we must look at the injection figures.
A vaccine still in the minority ...
At this stage, AstraZeneca is certainly still far from being the most administered vaccine in France.
According to data published by Public Health France, 1,358,990 people had received at least one dose of AstraZeneca on March 14, 2021, out of a total of more than five million French people “bitten” at least once.
The fault, above all, with a later arrival on the market.
While the European Medicines Agency had authorized Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine on December 21, 2020 and Moderna's on January 6, 2021, AstraZeneca's request did not reach the AEM until a week later, the January 12, and its authorization two more weeks later, on the 29th. Sufficient to fall a few steps behind its competitors.
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Thus, among the five million French people who received at least one dose, only a quarter received AstraZeneca.
Far ahead, Pfizer / BioNTech covers 70% of first-time injectors and Moderna only 5%.
Finally, note: barely sixty people have received two doses of AstraZeneca, when this is the case for more than 110,000 people for the Moderna vaccine and more than 2 million people thanks to the injection of Pfizer.
... but which has gained momentum last week
However, these figures should not deceive those who analyze them: in recent weeks, the AstraZeneca vaccine has taken on particular importance in the French vaccination campaign.
Between March 8 and 14, no less than 620,000 doses of this vaccine were administered.
This represents more than half of the 1.2 million first doses injected in France over the period.
Certain departments have more specifically benefited from this increase in power.
These are the most populous departments: the North, Paris, the Rhône, Haute-Garonne, Bouches-du-Rhône are thus among the main recipients, along with Gironde and Pas-de-Calais.
Reported to the population, however, it is in Haute-Vienne and Calvados that AstraZeneca weighed the most in the vaccination campaign.
At the number of first doses injected per 100 inhabitants, these two departments arrive in front of Paris, Gironde, Finistère, Cantal and Pas-de-Calais, all of them showing more than 2.8 first doses of AstraZeneca injected per 100 inhabitants .
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As these figures show, France has therefore made the AstraZeneca vaccine one of the pillars of its strategy to stop the spread of the epidemic.
Suffice to say that a permanent or even extended suspension would be a blow to France.