Vaccination to prevent containment?

Health nonsense -

Noureddine Ahmed / Shutterstock / SIPA

  • For several days, the government has been opposing confinement and vaccination, the latter having to be the miracle solution to escape the former.

  • A division that does not actually seem to take place.

  • Between lack of doses, speed and duration of vaccination and different roles, vaccination and confinement seem more complementary than opposed.

"You are nice, but as long as you have vaccines in the fridges, I will not reconfine people", would have launched Emmanuel Macron ten days ago in the Health Defense Council.

This weekend, while the situation in Île-de-France is explosive with resuscitation beds 96% occupied by Covid patients and an incidence of 353.1 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, Jean Castex announced the provision 25,000 additional doses of Pfizer vaccine in the region, to improve the situation.

As if, for the executive, vaccination could reverse things from the moment of the injection, and avoid more drastic measures.

It is quickly forgotten that the vaccination against the coronavirus of the three main vaccines available in France, is done in two doses, and that a delay is necessary between them.

Three weeks for the Pfizer vaccine, four weeks for Moderna, and between four and twelve weeks for AstraZeneca.

Immunity is considered to be maximal one week after the second dose.

Delayed effect

“Suddenly, such an opposition between confinement and vaccination does not make sense, declaims Jérôme Marty, president of the French Union for Free Medicine (UFML).

Vaccination takes between five and thirteen weeks to reach its true effect, but when a situation is as critical as in Ile-de-France, we cannot afford to wait that long.

The vaccination in nursing homes, which is a great success in view of the drop in mortality of this population (four times fewer deaths than before the start of the campaign), will have taken between six and eight weeks to allow this drop.

Another problem and not the least, the glaring lack of vaccine doses.

A fortiori after the announcements of Jean Castex this Saturday, announcing a new delay in the deliveries of AstraZeneca.

Despite these ups and downs, the Prime Minister wants for the moment to meet his target of ten million people vaccinated in mid-April.

Although insufficient to guarantee protection without reducing the incidence.

Especially since Jérôme Marty adds: “People in intensive care are getting younger and younger.

However, the vaccinated populations are made by age factor in France.

The people currently vaccinated are not those who risk going to intensive care, so that all the less resolves the problem of saturation of hospitals ”.

80% of resuscitation beds in France are occupied by Covid-19 patients, said the Minister of Health Olivier Véran on Thursday.

Dangerous traffic

The idea of ​​changing the age category to be vaccinated faces two major difficulties: the populations currently vaccinated are those most likely to die from the coronavirus, so we would only change the problem, and the younger the population, "more it is numerous, ”notes the doctor.

And once again, the doses are lacking.

In any case, even if France had infinite doses - which is very far from being the case - "no vaccination campaign can be exponentially faster than the virus", warns Franck Clarot, doctor of the collective " On the side of Science ”.

Once the virus gets out of control, you don't catch it.

This is why the doctor pleads to keep the viral circulation to a minimum under control.

He adds: “To think that vaccination will solve all the problems is to put it on a false pedestal.

"

Vaccination and incidence, two different issues

It is a mistake to count on vaccination to lower a plateau to 20,000 cases per day.

For Franck Clarot, this is mistaking the role of vaccination: "It is not intended to reduce the incidence, but mortality and severe forms".

And to let the virus circulate under the pretext that the fragile populations would be vaccinated and would not make more serious forms or of death is a dangerous bet according to the doctor: "A virus which circulates a lot, it is a virus which risks mutating, and which one day, a variant renders the vaccines obsolete.

“Not to mention long Covid cases, cases among young people, etc.

To reduce the incidence, it is necessary to break the chains of contamination, namely the role of containment.

"No country in the world has brought about a sudden drop in its number of cases with vaccination," he notes.

On the contrary, Israel and the United Kingdom, two model countries in terms of mass vaccination, have done so mainly during a very strict containment, resulting in fewer cases and better protection of the population.

No need to oppose the methods between them, or to consider them as exclusive.

“All the successful countries have adapted several measures.

Each measure must be one of the links in a defense against the coronavirus, and we cannot exclude one from the other, ”recalls Franck Clarot.

Or deal with just one, as the government is gradually learning, while the latter increasingly evokes confinement in Île-de-France.

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  • Vaccine

  • epidemic

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