At around 11 a.m. on Sunday, December 27, Mauricette, 78, received her first dose of Pfizer vaccine.
“
It's heating up!
», Reacted the resident of the long-term care unit of Sevran, saying«
moved
».
365 days and 121 million doses later, a real war machine is operating at full speed in France.
The campaign, started chugging along at the mercy of delivery hiccups, is now well established.
Looking back on one year of intensive vaccination in France.
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49.5 million French people fully vaccinated
In December 2020, the executive set a clear goal for the start of the campaign: to vaccinate 14 million people “
until spring
”.
By January, however, this quota had already been revised downwards.
Delays in delivery to the reluctance of the population, it was now a matter of first dosing 9 million French people by the end of March, then 10 million in mid-April, 20 million in mid-May and 30 million "
from here. summer
”.
As of May 31, barely 11 million French people were double-vaccinated.
Then France gradually caught up.
In one year, 121 million doses were administered.
The cruising speed is now reached, and the week of December 13 to 19 broke all records: more than 950,000 injections were carried out, including 870,000 booster.
Such a rate of vaccination is historic in France.
More than 1,600 vaccination centers opened
Created ad hoc throughout the months to follow the pace of large-scale vaccination, "
more than 1,600 centers have been active
" since the start of the campaign, indicates to
Figaro
the DGS. About 350 centers should offer the possibility of vaccinating 5-11 year olds by early January. Vaccination points have been set up throughout the country, among general practitioners, in midwifery offices, in pharmacies. Until taking the most unusual forms, such as at the Orangery of the Palace of Versailles, in the chapel of Pont-Audemer (Eure) or even in a nightclub in Moncoutant (Deux-Sèvres).
In April, to give the campaign a significant boost, the executive decided to open giant vaccination centers.
The Velodrome in Marseille, that of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the old exhibition center in Toulouse, the congress center in Nancy and a multisports hall in Royan, in Charente-Maritime have been requisitioned.
At the peak of the campaign in July, more than 100 vaccinodromes were active, one or two per department, including thirty-five deployed by the army and firefighters.
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28,000 injections in one week
This is the record established at the end of April in the largest vaccine park in France, installed at the Stade de France, in Seine-Saint-Denis. Managed jointly by the ARS of Ile-de-France, the prefecture, the departmental council, the city of Saint-Denis and the Paris fire brigade, the installation is huge: 20 boxes spread over 1,800 square meters , nearly 120 people mobilized every day for the injections. In the spring, the vaccinodrome provided nearly 4,000 daily vaccinations. Appointments were made via the Doctolib digital platform or via a specific line, available 7 days a week, held by around fifty students recruited on purpose.
While the enclosure of the Blues originally provided for the injection of 10,000 weekly doses, the threshold was largely exceeded with an average of 12,000 taken in charge each week in May.
1.3 million appointments made in 24 hours on Doctolib
Faced with a weakening vaccination campaign, Emmanuel Macron announced Monday, July 12 a major shift in health strategy: the extension of the health pass to public places. From August, restaurants, bars, cafes, shopping centers, planes and TGVs would be conditioned with the famous sesame. That same evening, the Doctolib platform was taken by storm; on the day of July 13 alone, 1.3 million appointments were reserved for the injection ... A peak was even observed at more than 20,000 reservations per minute! Assaulted, the site was quickly saturated.
Another record was broken a few months later in the fall.
The Head of State, seeing the arrival of the fifth wave and the Omicron variant, called on November 9 the citizens to carry out their vaccination booster.
Fifteen days later, Olivier Véran announced the opening of the vaccination booster to all adults as early as five months after the first injection.
"
This concerns 35 million French people
", he indicated.
The same day, nearly 960,000 people made an appointment on the Doctolib site, and 880,000 others the next day.
Since the start of the campaign, nearly 82 million appointments have been made via the platform.
15,000 pharmacies-laboratories
“
Pharmacists are essential pillars of this booster vaccination campaign.
They are more than 15,000 to have doses of messenger RNA vaccines
, ”declared Olivier Véran at the beginning of December.
Of the 21,000 pharmacies in France, 70% have turned into a vaccination center over the past year.
Already in March, when the executive decided to open vaccination to pharmacies and firefighters to vaccinate people from 50 to 64 years old suffering from co-morbidities, more than 18,000 pharmacies had responded: "
18,402
" exactly had ordered, indicated the Ministry of Health, for “
a total of 36,100 vials
”.
38,715 deaths averted in France among those over 60
This is the estimate of the WHO in its latest study on the effectiveness of vaccines, published on November 25. The international body was based on the mortality rate of people aged 60 and over in around thirty countries, from the last week of 2020 to the beginning of November 2021. Taking into account the speed and extent of vaccination in each country, she estimates that the United Kingdom has thus avoided 157,604 deaths from Covid-19. In Spain, they are said to be nearly 90,000 to have been saved by the vaccine.
If these figures remain simple estimates, another study on the French side, published at the end of August but this time covering the entire population, estimated that the campaign would have avoided 47,400 deaths linked to the virus for the period alone from January to August 2021. The authors, researchers from the University of Montpellier, clarified that this was only an "
order of magnitude
", but that this value was the median of various carefully analyzed scenarios, including the most pessimistic evokes 36,000 lives saved, the most optimistic 62,000.
