The vaccination plan in France is not called into question by the delivery times announced by some manufacturers, recently AstraZeneca, assured Saturday January 23 the Minister for Industry, Agnès Pannier-Runacher.

"We have new vaccines arriving, we have Pfizer which is increasing its production capacity," she said on France Inter.

"We had indicated a million people vaccinated at the end of January, we are at 950,000 today. So this target will be exceeded," said the minister.

"We have also indicated 15 million people vaccinated in June. I am reasonably confident that this target will be exceeded," she continued.

"Lower yield" at AstraZeneca

Deliveries of the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine in Europe, subject to its approval, will be smaller than expected, due to a "drop in yield" at a manufacturing site, the British group said on Friday.

The European Commission had initially reserved up to 400 million doses of this vaccine.

"Regarding AstraZeneca, they tell us that they have a problem with one factory so I suggested that they work on finding solutions, perhaps by looking for other factories to produce and they tell us' We prefer to concentrate our teams at this plant to overcome this difficult course '", she said.

"So everyone is on the move, everyone is mobilized," she said, without giving a figure on the impact of the delays announced by AstraZeneca.

"Slowdown caught up"

The American group Pfizer had also announced delivery delays for the vaccine developed with the German BioNTech, but the partners then announced a "plan" to limit them to one week.

"In France, we have no delays in the delivery of doses of Pfizer. There was a slowdown last week but which is caught up," assured Agnès Pannier-Runacher.

"More than 2 million doses have been delivered since the start of the campaign and these are mainly doses of Pfizer since Moderna has a much smaller number of doses delivered," she said.

With AFP

The summary of the week

France 24 invites you to come back to the news that marked the week

I subscribe

Take international news everywhere with you!

Download the France 24 application

google-play-badge_FR