France is getting a new Covid vaccine! This Friday January 8, France’s vaccine campaign coordinator Alain Fischer told Jean-Jacques Bourdin on BFMTV that Moderna vaccine is to be issued in the country “from mid-January. […] Deliveries are to be completed in the coming days. Let’s say, to be cautious: from mid-January” he adds.
The vaccine has been recently approved by the European Medicines Agency but still waiting to be approved by the Haute Autorité de Santé even though their review is purely on a consultative purpose. Yet, this announcement goes against what the Health Minister announced the day before, on Thursday January 7, 2021, at a press brief held with Prime Minister Jean Castex, as for the arrival of these doses “some 50,000 first Moderna vaccines will be delivered from Monday” Olivier Véran said.
Anyway, these deliveries are to complete the number of doses already available, enabling a better vaccine cover for people the most at risk, and therefore more likely to develop a severe form of the disease. “Having two vaccines enables to vaccinate more and then improve the vaccine campaign” Alain Fischer goes on.
The coordinator also addressed the vaccine effectiveness against the new variants spreading in the country, saying that nothing enables to say that if they have an impact or not on the new strain: “We don’t even have the news yet. […] We can hope it goes away; we’ll soon get […] data” he explains.
For the record, since the vaccine campaign started in France, 45,000 people have been vaccinated.
