From February 25, general practitioners will be able to vaccinate some of their patients aged 50 to 64, with co-morbidities, with the AstraZeneca vaccine.

However, a few hours before the expiration of the deadline for ordering the first ten doses in pharmacies, only 17,000 practitioners had taken the plunge. 

From February 25, city doctors will have the opportunity to inject the AstraZeneca vaccine into people aged 50 to 64 who present with comorbidities, such as hypertension, cancer or obesity.

A new organization to speed up the vaccination campaign against the Covid-19 epidemic.

Nearly 700,000 doses are expected in pharmacies within five to six days.

To benefit from it, doctors have until Wednesday evening to register with pharmacies and place an order.

But for now, the craze is far from expectations.

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17,000 registered out of 50,000 general practitioners

First possible explanation, general practitioners would have had the information late: only Friday evening, while the deadline for placing orders expires Wednesday evening.

The procedure is however simple.

Doctors must order pharmacists near them to get ten doses for that week, contained in one vial.

Pharmacists centralize requests, send them to the ARS in their region, which reports to Public Health France.

Finally, the doses should arrive in pharmacies. 

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Thus, 70,000 vials containing 700,000 doses will be available in the coming days, or one vial per doctor.

According to information from Europe 1, only 17,000 general practitioners have ordered out of 50,000 practitioners, or barely one in three.

AstraZeneca vaccine "slows down heat" 

According to Jacques Battistoni, president of the MG France general practitioner union, this reluctance is also explained by the nature of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

"First of all, the vaccine is a little less effective than the Pfizer vaccine and the doctors finally say to themselves that it may be better to wait until they have other vaccines," he says.

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"And also, this has been heard on several occasions in hospitals in particular, the first vaccinated with the Astra vaccine often presented undesirable effects and this is certainly likely to slow down the ardor of general practitioners", adds the doctor .