Saint-Rémy-sur-Avre (France) (AFP)
Emmanuel Macron donned a charlotte and white coat on Friday to visit the factory of the Delpharm group in Eure-et-Loir, which has just started bottling the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19, a first on French soil.
This visit comes at a time when the Haute Autorité de Santé has just recommended, for those under 55 who have received a dose of AstraZeneca vaccine, that their second dose be a messenger RNA vaccine like that of Pfizer or Moderna.
For this operation, the Delpharm group, which has a turnover of 800 million euros, 17 sites and 4,700 employees, hired 60 additional people and invested 20 million euros in its Saint-Remy-sur-Avre site. , including 10.4 million state aid.
The Delpharm plant on Tuesday received the bulk vaccines delivered to it from the BioNTech site in Marburg (Germany) where they are manufactured.
In total, the goal set by Emmanuel Macron is to reach the 250 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines produced in France in 2021.
The Recipharm company must start to bottle Moderna vaccines in Indre-et-Loire, the Fareva company will take care of the CureVac vaccine - not yet approved in the EU - in Eure and in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, and Sanofi will bottle from this summer the vaccine of its competitor Johnson & Johnson, near Lyon.
The Delpharm site should produce around one hundred million doses of the Pfizer vaccine by the end of 2021, primarily intended for the French and European markets.
"We are proud to be a link in the chain. We are aware of the importance of what we do," an employee told the president as she boxed bottles.
© 2021 AFP