France is stepping up its coronavirus vaccine rollout by widening further its first target group to include more health workers and simplifying a cumbersome process to deliver jabs more quickly, Health Minister Olivier Veran said yesterday.
The coronavirus causes the Covid-19 respiratory disease.
France’s inoculation campaign got off to a slow start, hampered in part by red tape and President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to tread warily in one of the most vaccine-sceptical countries in the world.
But France has fallen behind neighbours such as Britain and Germany, and the president is now demanding the vaccination programme be expedited.
Veran told RTL radio that the government was going to “accelerate and simplify our vaccination strategy”.
Some 300 vaccination centres would be operational from next week, the minister said, after initially ruling out such centres.
The original plan had been for the first phase of the vaccine rollout, which began in France on December 27, to focus on nursing home residents and their carers.
By the end of the first week, France had delivered just over 500 Covid-19 shots.
The head of the union of pharmacies – whose ubiquitous network helps administer millions of flu jabs every year – urged the government to allow it to do the same for Covid-19 shots.
“If we only rely on vaccination centres, we can be sure the level of vaccination by June will be mediocre.
That would be a disaster,” Gilles Bonnefond of the USPO pharmacists’ union told, Reuters in an interview. “We can be operational in a week.”
The coronavirus has claimed the lives of 65,415 people in France, the seventh-highest death toll in the world.
The new coronavirus variant discovered in Britain could become a pandemic within a pandemic, Switzerland’s infection control chief said yesterday.
Switzerland, where daily case numbers are at a high level, has found the mutation in 28 samples – all people who arrived from Britain, or people with whom they had been in contact.
“This new variant could behave like a new pandemic within the pandemic,” Virginie Masserey, head of the health ministry’s infection control department, told journalists in the capital Bern. “That is to say it could spread exponentially and, indeed, add a new wave to the existing wave.
“That’s why it is very important to really respect the measures that are recommended, to really reduce the number of infections.”
The new variant has been found in seven of the 26 Swiss cantons, including Zurich, Geneva and Bern.
The Netherlands government was caught off guard by the approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by EU regulators in December and has been unable to start vaccinating due to logistical problems, Prime Minister Mark Rutte told parliament yesterday.
The Netherlands has hundreds of thousands of Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine doses in cold storage, but will not give a first shot until today, in a limited roll-out to health care workers.
Rutte’s government was criticised by lawmakers during a debate for allowing the Netherlands to be the last country in the EU to begin vaccinating.
The Netherlands was not prepared for the logistics of distributing the Pfizer vaccine, which must be stored at -70° Celsius, Rutte told parliament.
“The main problem was that we got (the approval) sooner than we had expected,” Rutte said. “It was a different vaccine (than we had expected)...making it impossible to be flexible.”
Germany is extending its nationwide lockdown until the end of the month and introducing tougher new restrictions in an effort to curb surging coronavirus infections, Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday.
“We need to restrict contact more strictly ... we ask all citizens to restrict contact to the absolute minimum,” she told reporters after a meeting with the leaders of Germany’s 16 federal states.
The new rules restrict for the first time non-essential travel for residents of hard-hit areas all over Germany.
“We believe these measures are justified, even if they are hard,” Merkel said.
The chancellor said she and the state leaders would review the new measures on January 25.
Belgium will receive only half the doses of US drugmaker Pfizer vaccine it ordered for January because of a logistical difficulty that occurred last month.
Health ministry spokesman Yves Van Laethem said a logistical issue in the second half of December prevented the delivery of the vaccines as planned in the Belgian vaccination strategy, without detailing the problem.
“The company Pfizer, which supplies us, will only be able to supply half of the planned doses for the month of January and so we go from 600,000 doses to a little over 300,000 doses,” Van Laethem told a news conference.
Denmark said yesterday that it was toughening coronavirus restrictions and urged people to avoid social contacts, hoping to protect its health system from a coronavirus variant that first emerged in Britain.
On top of a partial lockdown in place since mid-December, Copenhagen will bar gatherings of more than five people – down from 10 previously – and ask people to remain 2m apart, rather than 1m.
The new measures will take effect from today.
“Stay at home as much as you can, don’t meet people outside your household, those close to you,” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at a press conference.
Related Story