Vaccination against the coronavirus is a “speed race”, said the President of the Republic on Tuesday during his visit to a vaccination center in Valenciennes, in the North. A competition that Emmanuel Macron intends to win by boosting the deliveries of vials of vaccines against the coronavirus. But already in several French vaccination centers, several injection slots are not finding takers.
Several vacant places to get vaccinated
In Niort, Mimizan, Yvetot or Montélimar, several meetings are still available on Friday, or even this weekend. In Hauts-de-Seine, for a first injection, it is no longer necessary to wait two months, but one to two weeks, according to a center manager.
So to avoid losing doses of the anti-Covid vaccine, we have to adapt. “We have to call back other patients,” says Cyril Moesch, doctor at the Ussel hospital, in Corrèze. But that implies some constraints: “recalling someone 80 years old at 7 pm in the evening, who has already started to go to bed, it’s difficult … We lost no doses, fortunately but we had a hard time!”
“It is necessary to relax the eligibility criteria to access vaccination”
There are several reasons for the vacancies. First, the controversy over the Swedish-British vaccine AstraZeneca slowed down appointments. But there are also more vaccination centers and more and more vaccines for fewer and fewer volunteers in the public authorized to access them.
This is in any case what underlines Florian Bouquet, the president of the departmental council of the Territory of Belfort. “We feel that we have reached a plateau and that it is now necessary to relax the eligibility criteria to access vaccination,” he explains. For him, it would now be possible to “calmly consider generalized vaccination, to open it to all audiences”.
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