France’s slow introduction to COVID-19 vaccines is attracting critics

PARIS (Reuters) – France’s slow launch of its COVID-19 vaccination campaign against its European neighbors caught fire from some doctors and scientists on Wednesday, although the government has said it was expecting increase the program.

France, which is specifically targeting the most vulnerable in nursing homes for the first phase of the vaccine, has so far given doses to around 140 people.

That’s well below the 42,000 tally in Germany, for example, which also began rolling out on Sunday as part of a coordinated European campaign.

The French health ministry confirmed the number of kicks, while officials have said the start was deliberately slow as they embarked on logistics. One million people will have been vaccinated by February, and France will join other countries, the government has said.

But some doctors have disallowed too much warning and red tape in the campaign, in one of the countries with the highest level of vaccine suspects in the world.

Opinion polls show that less than half the population expects a COVID shot, even though France is one of the toughest countries in Europe.

“It is not by taking a child’s steps that we can convince people, on the other hand,” geneticist Axel Kahn told Europe 1 radio on Wednesday.

Doctors including Bruno Megarbane, a rehabilitation specialist at the Lariboisiere hospital in Paris, have said the government should simplify pre-vaccination consultation procedures.

“Like many of my colleagues, I think we need to move much faster with this vaccination campaign so that we can bring epilepsy under control more quickly,” said expert Nathan Peiffer-Smadja infectious disease at Bichat hospital in Paris. in a Twitter statement.

Opposition politicians have called for the government to publish a more detailed timeline of their immunization program.

Alain Fischer, a pediatrician and psychologist who leads the French vaccination strategy, has identified challenging challenges such as transporting the doses to nursing homes and it has been said that France did not want the initiative to torn.

“We have to get things right,” Fischer told Franceinfo radio on Wednesday.

France ranks fifth highest in the world at 2.57 million, and death tax of 64,078 deaths, the seventh highest worldwide.

Unlike some countries, France had chosen not to create large vaccine centers for the treatment of humans, Health Minister Olivier Veran said this week, saying this had not worked before. Doctors were instead dispensing doses inside care homes, but the process took longer to implement, he said.