The French national health authority – the Haute Autorité de la Santé – has called for a delay in giving people six weeks of Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines to give their first injection to more people.
“The high level of contamination remains and an alarming concern of new changes calls for vaccine acceleration to address the risk of the disease spreading in the coming weeks,” the watchdog wrote in a statement on Saturday.
“To protect the growing number of people at risk of hospitalization or death, HAS is proposing to extend to 6 weeks the interval between two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines,” he said.
The call came a day after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the British variant of coronavirus was more lethal than expected.
The French watchdog believed that the delay in the second injection could accelerate the protection of the most vulnerable. It was estimated that if six weeks before the second vaccine injection, 700,000 more people would be vaccinated in the first month.
Paris has struggled with the spread of their vaccine campaign, with just 1.21 vaccines per 100 people (823,567 injections in total). That puts it at the bottom of the list compared to other EU countries, according to the POLITICO study.
Following Johnson’s announcement of the risks posed by UK variability, senior doctors called on the British government to widen the gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine from 12 weeks to six, according to the BBC.
On Friday, England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty described the country as “extremely fragile”, the BBC said. Although the rate of reproduction (or R) of the virus is estimated to be at or below the first time since early December, Whitty said “little change and it could begin to eradicate again from a very high base. “