Scandal for many, a situation expected and monitored by the government.
Tens or even hundreds of thousands of vaccine slots are currently available in France.
The Vite ma Dose application, which lists open appointments on five platforms (including the giant Doctolib) during the next 50 days, lists 280,000 this Wednesday at noon, spread over more than 2,000 places.
A situation sometimes considered "ubiquitous" when millions of French people would like to be vaccinated with the serum as quickly as possible.
The authorities ensure that it is monitored very closely, while considering that it is not surprising and refusing - for the moment - to widen the target audiences.
What do these available slots represent?
Vite Ma Dose presents them on its site as “available slots”, and on its iPhone application as “available doses”. Which is not quite the same. In reality, "this does not correspond to the number of doses, or of people who could be vaccinated" but "to the number of appointments available for the next 50 days on one of the 5 supported platforms", explained this Wednesday morning on Twitter Guillaume Rozier, the founder of Vite ma Dose, telling us that an update on the Apple application should be made in the next few days. There may in fact be several injections planned on a single niche, and conversely pharmacists or doctors can offer several niches to be sure of finding a taker, especially in rural areas.
This number of slots displayed on @ViteMaDose_off corresponds to the number of appointments available for the next 50 days on one of the 5 supported platforms (Doctolib, Maiia, Keldoc, Mapharma, Ordoclic).
- GRZ (@GuillaumeRozier) April 28, 2021
Regardless of the precise number of people who can sign up, the point is, there are plenty of slots available.
According to our information, the vast majority of them relate to the Pfizer vaccination.
“It is true that we have a number of appointments that are not honored.
According to the information I have, we should not exaggerate [their number], ”said Jean Castex on Wednesday noon.
"There are a number of large centers, especially large metropolitan vaccination centers, which have vaccination slots that remain open," Olivier Véran also acknowledged on Tuesday.
How is this explained?
Most disturbing is that some of these dates are offered for the same day or later. They are sometimes made available very shortly before, but can remain available for long hours. “It is normal that there are more and more slots available at a given time, because we have more and more doses and therefore the centers are constantly opening appointments. The major question is the time to make an appointment. They must not remain vacant too long, otherwise the supply would no longer be in line with demand, ”the Ministry of Health said.
These availabilities would be "the reflection of the increase in vaccine deliveries, in particular of messenger RNA vaccines in Île-de-France and the 20% more slots that could be opened compared to what had been expected", indicated for his part Olivier Véran, specifying that the situation is far from being the same throughout the territory.
Olivier Véran "notes that there are a certain number of large vaccination centers which have open vaccination slots" pic.twitter.com/I7ESRkPrrd
- BFMTV (@BFMTV) April 27, 2021
Are these doses necessarily lost?
No. It is not because appointments are not reserved on a Doctolib type platform that the doses are not administered. Vaccination centers generally have a list of eligible people to contact in case of availability, because not all of them necessarily have the reflex to go and find an appointment on the Internet. "I invite them to rush to their phone or to their computer to see if the center closest to them does not have slots," insisted Olivier Véran.
For the moment, unless you have a very high-risk disease of serious form or exercise a priority profession, you must be at least 55 years old to be able to be vaccinated.
This is, at least, the national framework.
But some centers are freed from it, especially at the end of the day, and young people can already be bitten thanks to this (and without "taking the place" of another person).
Will the government extend vaccination to other audiences?
In the immediate future, no. It would be "premature", hammered Jean Castex. The government wants first to reach people in the target and who have not yet been vaccinated. More than 7 million over 60 years are in this case, according to data from Public Health France. Some of them are still reluctant, others have tested positive less than three times ago and should not be bitten yet. In the end, "if we set a target of 80% of an age group that must be vaccinated to be protected, there are still 4.3 million French people who are subject to vaccination who have not yet been vaccinated, ”said Olivier Véran on Tuesday.
However, it seems more and more possible that the government does not wait until May 15, the planned opening date for 50-54 year olds, to expand vaccination.
These people will then need Pfizer or Moderna, the AstraZeneca and Janssen adenovirus vaccines being reserved for those over 55 years of age due to the - very low - risk of thrombosis.
"I'm betting on an announcement for next week," even anticipates a doctor, while Emmanuel Macron is due to speak on Friday.
Read also AstraZeneca and Janssen vaccines: why France risks having too many doses in stock
Not waiting for May 15 seems all the more possible as deliveries will accelerate.
Next week alone, nearly 3 million doses of the two messenger RNA products, including 2.5 million from Pfizer, are due to be delivered to France, according to data available on data.gouv.fr.
A very large delivery of over 2 million AstraZeneca doses, the largest since the start, is also expected.
These will be intended entirely for people at least 55 years old and not yet vaccinated (and the first "reminders" of those who received the first injection in early February).
As long as there are enough volunteers.
How is it going abroad?
In Europe, all countries are subject to the same pace of deliveries and must therefore move forward category by category of population.
Impossible, we need doses, to open the floodgates at once.
Several regions in Germany have made the choice in recent days to authorize AstraZeneca to all adults, and some centers have quickly been bombarded with requests.
In Berlin, it is mainly general practitioners who vaccinate with Astra Zeneca.
They have been under water since this decision was taken: a doctor explains that he receives 200 emails every day from people who want to be vaccinated with AZ.
- Vincent Glad (@vincentglad) April 27, 2021
Other large countries, such as the United States and Israel, have been much faster in expanding immunization to younger adults. But then they had much larger stocks.
