An employee of the Edouard Herriot hospital in Lyon, receives a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Saturday February 6, 2021. -
Olivier Chassignole / AP / SIPA
273,000 doses of the vaccine developed by Oxford / AstraZeneca will be distributed this week in France.
This third vaccine differs from the first two - Pfizer and Moderna - and targets other categories of the population in particular.
Easier to store, this vaccine can be injected by many healthcare professionals.
In Nancy, Lyon or Bordeaux, the same scenes were repeated every weekend in hospitals.
Since Saturday, February 6, caregivers and health professionals can benefit from a new vaccine to fight the coronavirus epidemic.
Target audience, technology, method of preservation, this product developed by Oxford-AstraZeneca, differs from the two other vaccines - Pfizer and Moderna - already issued in France.
If its particularities can have a significant impact on the current vaccination campaign, vigilance must remain a priority for the entire population, warn the scientists.
An increase in doses
First good news, the arrival of a new vaccine in France is synonymous with an increase in doses.
And who says more doses means an increase in the number of people vaccinated.
In a press release released on February 6, the Ministry of Health specifies that 273,000 doses will be distributed this week "in pivotal health establishments, then allocated by the ARS to the various places of vaccination".
The following week, 304,800 new doses will be distributed in the territory.
To accompany these deliveries, the government announced that new registration slots for vaccination would be offered to the populations concerned with the target of 1.7 million new meetings between mid-February and March.
But delivery delays
But this acceleration could be short-lived.
AstraZeneca, whose product "was going to be the mass vaccine for the first quarter" of 2021, could only guarantee 25% of the more than 100 million doses promised at the European Union level, which represents "a real problem ”for the Twenty-Seven, declared at the beginning of last week the Director-General of Health within the Commission, Sandra Gallina, in front of MEPs.
A delay which pushed the European Commission to turn to vaccines manufactured by the BioNTech / Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson laboratories.
A new target audience
In France, as in many European countries, the High Authority for Health has recommended the use of this vaccine only for people under 65 years of age, due to the little data available on the effectiveness of this product on populations over elderly.
Two audiences will therefore be vaccinated as a priority: health professionals under 65 and people aged between 50 and 65 who present with comorbidities.
“It is really essential that caregivers are vaccinated.
Since the WHO has specified that the initial group immunity objective would not be reached before 2023, we must succeed in protecting the most fragile people and those who are most exposed to the virus, ”underlines Mylène Ogliastro, virologist at INRA Montpellier, vice-president of the French Society of Virology.
“The goal is not to have 100% vaccinated.
But if we arrive at 60 or 70% vaccinated, we will have coverage that will allow us both to fight against the circulation of the virus within the hospital and, on the other hand, to have people able to s 'occupy the sick', detailed on France Info on Saturday the infectious disease specialist Christian Rabaud, president of the medical commission of establishments of the CHRU of Nancy
.
Reduced virus transmission
According to an Oxford study, which has yet to be peer reviewed before being published, the transmission of Covid-19 after the injection of the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine is reduced by 67%.
Not only would vaccinated people be protected from the disease, but they would therefore be less able to transmit it to others.
Mylène Ogliastro explains: “With the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, doubts remained on this point.
However, if AstraZeneca blocks the entry of the virus into cells and blocks transmission, this means greater protective immunity.
And this is what, in the long term, would allow us to find a more or less normal life ”.
Simplified logistics
This is the other novelty brought by the arrival of AstraZeneca.
Based on more conventional technology, this vaccine can be stored for six months in the refrigerator.
Very quickly, pharmacists "will obviously be able to vaccinate, we need them, we have a network of pharmacies on the territory which is extremely dense", declared Monday February 2 the spokesman of the government, Gabriel Attal, on France 5. The Haute Autorité de santé (HAS), for its part, has declared itself in favor of extending “vaccine skills” to midwives.
Here again, this good news should not be accompanied by a general relaxation of the population, insists the virologist Mylène Ogliastro: “In the context, any scientific advance is a reason to rejoice.
But above all, we must not relax.
The stake is really there.
Because if we let all the existing variants circulate, the consequence is that we risk, in the long term, allowing the virus to escape vaccines.
"
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