Serious things start this weekend.
After the European Medicines Agency, its French counterpart validated the anti-Covid Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Thursday, December 24. This means that from this Sunday the first doses can be administered in order to stop the pandemic which we have now been talking about for a year.
The University Hospital of Tours indicated in the middle of the week that it would be the depository of the first syringes intended for the department of Indre-et-Loire because it was equipped with a super-freezer allowing it to store the product at -70 ° , its storage temperature. A relatively rare equipment which complicates the organization of the campaign a little, but each machine can contain a large number of vaccines.
The Touraine hospital will receive its first doses this Saturday, 24 hours before the official start of the vaccination. The government has chosen to start by immunizing dependent elderly people housed in EHPAD before health personnel, people at risk and the rest of the population by spring. It is therefore in a retirement home in the department that the first syringes will be sent. Not on Sunday when only two French establishments will be able to start the process but on Monday.
It is the EHPAD Debrou in Joué-lès-Tours – spared by the first wave of spring but which suffered from the second with several deaths – which will benefit. No resident will be vaccinated without their consent or that of their relatives. A medical consultation will also be necessary before any administration of the product. The relatives of the elderly who live in this brand new institution have started to be informed by the management. It should be remembered that this solution requires a double injection to have a maximum chance of not catching the disease.
The authorities have high hopes for the arrival of vaccines in order to curb the number of new contaminations and finally alleviate health constraints. In addition to the American-German Pfizer-BioNTech formula, the Moderna lanatoratoire is in the running and should in part rely on the Recipharm de Monts plant in Tours for the distribution of its vaccine in France; For its part, Sanofi will still take several months before distributing its own doses: the French company is still at the testing stage and moreover it is a partner of the Tours University Hospital which will follow volunteers to test the injection on which its researchers have worked.
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