“It’s historic!”, Rejoiced the head of the hospital pharmacy pole of the Hospitals of Paris, Franck Huet. Its establishment located in the Paris suburbs received, early this Saturday morning, the very first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19 from France. Vaccination will begin Sunday in the territory – where more than 62,000 people have died after being infected with the coronavirus – as throughout the European Union. The first injections will take place in two establishments for the elderly, in Sevran (Seine-Saint-Denis) and Dijon (Côte-d’Or).
Some 19,500 doses of the vaccine contained in 3,900 vials, according to the Assistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), were transported aboard a refrigerated truck that made the trip from the Pfizer plant in Puurs, in the north-east of Belgium.
Six bottles in Burgundy, three in Seine-Saint-Denis
At the central pharmacy of the AP-HP, the product was repackaged this Saturday morning before its re-shipment to the long-term care unit of the René-Muret hospital in Sevran and the Champmaillot geriatric center at the Dijon University Hospital. Six bottles will be delivered in Burgundy, three in Seine-Saint-Denis, according to the AP-HP.
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The arrival in the EU of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was validated on Monday by the European Medicines Agency. The French green light was then issued Thursday by the High Authority for Health (HAS). The launch of the vaccination campaign is eagerly awaited while a first case of contamination by the Covid-19 variant which appeared in the United Kingdom was detected in France on Friday, in Tours, in a Frenchman usually residing in Great Britain.
The campaign for the 7,000 nursing homes in France, their residents and their caregivers likely to develop serious forms of Covid-19 will not really start on a large scale until early 2021.
