Vaccine: France first country to recommend a single dose for people who have already had Covid - France 24

Paris (AFP)

French health authorities recommended Friday to "offer only one dose" of the Covid-19 vaccine to people "who have already had an infection" with the coronavirus, becoming the first country to make such a recommendation.

People cured of Covid-19 "have already developed an immune memory during the infection. The single dose of vaccine will thus play a reminder role", explains the High Authority for Health (HAS) in its opinion, which has yet to receive government approval.

The authority also recommends to wait "beyond three months" after the illness, "and preferably six months", before injecting this single dose.

"To date, no country has clearly positioned itself on a one-dose vaccination for people who contracted Covid-19 prior to the vaccination", she underlines.

In recent days, this solution was mentioned in several studies carried out in the United States and Italy, and not yet evaluated by other scientists.

In addition to the health benefits, the researchers behind this work pointed out that giving a single injection to people already ill in the past could save doses in a context of constrained supply.

The French government generally follows the advice of the Haute Autorité de Santé.

At the end of January, however, he felt that the time between the two doses of Pfizer vaccine could not be increased, contrary to the recommendation issued a few days earlier by the HAS.

The health authorities are betting a lot on the progress of the vaccination campaign to face the epidemic situation which remains fragile, but the road is still long: Thursday, 2,135,333 people had received at least one dose of vaccine in France, including 535,775 people two doses.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, 3.4 million cases of infections confirmed by a screening test have been recorded in France.

More people have likely contracted the virus, especially during the first wave, when testing was not widely available.

The three Covid-19 vaccines currently authorized in the European Union (Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca / Oxford) require two doses to be fully effective in people who have never been in contact with the virus.

That of Johnson & Johnson, currently under review by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), however requires a single injection.

© 2021 AFP