The first vaccines shipped throughout the European Union will be shipped from the Pfizer plant in Puurs, Belgium.

In this city of the Pharma Valley between Antwerp and Brussels, paranoia does not seem to be present.

This does not prevent the doses soon dispatched from being placed under very high security.

REPORTAGE

Monday is decisive for the vaccine against Covid-19 in the European Union: the European Medicines Agency must give the green light to the vaccine from Pfizer / BioNTech, less than a week before the theoretical date of the first vaccinations .

Before being shipped throughout Europe, the vaccine is produced entirely at the Pfizer plant in Puurs, a small Belgian town of 25,000 inhabitants.

But if the period is crucial and the vaccine very strongly awaited by an entire continent, the Flemish site of the American laboratory is not really in turmoil.

Trucks will not be identifiable 

Rather, it is a feeling of serenity that reigns in Puurs.

The site appeared to be at a standstill on Sunday and the first employees arrived early Monday morning.

These 3,000 employees are prohibited from speaking.

There is secrecy but no paranoia or excessive security: a simple fence, a few cameras, but nothing more around this site located in what the Belgians call the Pharma Valley, between Antwerp and Brussels.

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It is from this city surrounded by fields of asparagus that trucks are supposed to leave for all of Europe.

These trucks must not be identifiable, to avoid any theft of vaccines.

Inside the trailers, there is something to monitor the doses from a distance: everything is tracked in real time by GPS.

There are even sensors that record and transmit the temperature of the cabinets at all times to make sure it stays at -70 degrees.

In the event of rewarming, an alert is given so as not to compromise the effectiveness of the doses.

Very strict rules for each country

For Europe, the distribution rules are very strict: each country has its quota and only its quota.

This is established according to the population of each Member State.

The infection rate, like the alert levels, is absolutely irrelevant.

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France will therefore receive 15% of the vaccine doses produced here, or a little over a million before the end of December.

"Next Monday, we will normally have started to vaccinate", assured Olivier Véran on Europe 1. In the meantime, these vaccines will be stored in one of the 130 French sites distributed throughout the country and capable of keeping them at low temperature .