“
Incomprehensible and risky
”.
This is how the Order of Pharmacists described the government's decision to authorize the sale of self-tests in large and medium-sized stores until January 31. The Order expressed its strong reaction to this government decree. in a press release published on Wednesday.
"
It is a very surprising decision insofar as it completely changes the French screening strategy
" worries the president of the FSPF, a federation of pharmacists' unions, Philippe Besset, interviewed by
Le Figaro
.
To discover
The 2021 Christmas bonus will be paid from December 15
Read alsoCovid-19: are the self-tests reliable?
Until now, the executive's strategy was based on the triptych "
test, alert, protect
".
Individuals came to be tested by a health professional who, in the event of a positive test, entered the result into a database.
Contact persons were then informed so that they could be tested themselves.
This procedure "
is not possible if people self-test
" warns Philippe Besset.
Consequence:
"the number of positives will decrease since we are no longer going to trace them" he
warns.
Decision taken without warning
Expanding the medical arsenal at this stage of the epidemic is "
not necessarily a bad thing,
" specifies the pharmacist. Indeed, he sees a potential interest in people who are neither symptomatic nor contact cases. In this case, the self-tests can only detect additional contaminations compared to those which would have been recorded anyway. In other cases, that is to say in the case of people who until now have been tested in a pharmacy, the contaminations revealed by the self-tests will pass under the radars.
"If you change your strategy, you have to say it"
clearly, continues the pharmacist. However, the executive has not yet announced any change in its overall strategy. Moreover, many instructions remain unclear at this stage:
"we, health personnel, still do not know what the isolation protocol is with Omicron, or what to respond to vaccinated people who are contact cases for Omicron".
If the decision to authorize the sale in large and medium-sized stores surprises pharmacists so much, it is also because they were not notified before the publication of the government decree in the Official Journal.
For two years, health measures were first subject to consultation with health professionals and health authorities, then the Minister of Health outlined the government's overall strategy and, only afterwards, the decision appeared in the Official Journal.
"
There, the decree appeared without any of that
" insists the president of the FSPF.
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/KMEYMJKESBAZBE4MRBAM4TGHIQ.jpg)
