Tag Archives: Health Minister Olivier Veran

France cranks up vaccine rollout to deliver shots faster

By Dominique Vidalon and Sudip Kar-Gupta

PARIS (Reuters) -France is stepping up its COVID-19 vaccine rollout by widening further its first target group to include more health workers and simplifying a cumbersome process to deliver jabs more quickly, Health Minister Olivier Veran said on Tuesday.

France’s inoculation campaign got off to a slow start, hampered in part by red tape and President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to tread warily in one of the most vaccine-skeptical countries in the world.

But France has fallen behind neighbors such as Britain and Germany, and the president is now demanding the vaccination program be expedited.

Veran told RTL radio that the government was going to “accelerate and simplify our vaccination strategy”.

Some 300 vaccination centers would be operational from next week, the minister said, after initially ruling out such centers.

The original plan had been for the first phase of the vaccine rollout, which began in France on Dec. 27, to focus on nursing home residents and their carers. By the end of the first week, France had delivered just over 500 COVID-19 shots.

Over the weekend, the first hospital staff began receiving the vaccine. The government has now added paramedics and health workers to the first target group.

By the end of January, France will have begun vaccinating people aged 75 and above who are living at home, Veran said.

The head of the union of pharmacies – whose ubiquitous network helps administer millions of flu jabs every year – urged the government to allow it to do the same for COVID-19 shots.

“If we only rely on vaccination centers, we can be sure the level of vaccination by June will be mediocre. That would be a disaster,” Gilles Bonnefond of the USPO pharmacists’ union told, Reuters in an interview. “We can be operational in a week.”

The coronavirus has claimed the lives of 65,415 people in France, the seventh-highest death toll in the world.

France received an initial 500,000 doses of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech and was due to receive an additional 500,000 per week. It will also get 500,000 doses per month of Moderna’s vaccine once it obtains regulatory approval in Europe and France.

MORE JABS

Rules demanding that only a doctor or a nurse under the direct supervision of a doctor inject the vaccine will be eased. Veran said a doctor would be allowed to supervise multiple nurses at any one time in a vaccination center.

Similarly, rules requiring that any person wanting a COVID-19 vaccine must hold a consultation with a doctor first would also be made simpler.

Veran also said about 10 to 15 cases of the new variant of the coronavirus first seen in Britain had been detected in France. Its rapid spread through southern England compelled British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to announce a third nationwide lockdown on Monday.

France remains under nightly curfew. Restaurants, bars, museums and cinemas are still closed. Veran said he hoped France would be able to open its ski resorts for the February holidays, but that such a move would depend on how active the virus was.

(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon, Sudip Kar-Gupta and Michel Rose; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Ed Osmond, Raissa Kasolowsky and Alex Richardson)

French labs show how global supply bottlenecks thwart effort to ramp up testing

By Richard Lough

PARIS (Reuters) – Mass testing was meant to be the answer to the second wave. Politicians promised that with enough tests, conducted quickly enough, they could keep the coronavirus in check, without having to resort to lockdowns that crippled economies six months ago.

But so far, with a surge sweeping Europe just as students return to school and university, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. There aren’t enough tests, and they are taking too long.

Pierre-Adrien Bihl, who runs four labs that together conduct 800 tests a day in eastern France, has one explanation for what has gone wrong: a global supply chain that can’t keep up.

“I spend my days checking orders have been made and received and hassling my supplier to deliver, deliver, deliver,” he said. “But all their clients demand the same thing.”

French President Emmanuel Macron, like other European leaders, has pressed for a swift increase in tests. His government promises that anyone who needs a test can get one.

But five companies that operate laboratories in Paris and eastern France told Reuters there was simply no way they could work any faster, as long as they are struggling to obtain chemicals and test kits that are mainly produced abroad.

This week, Bihl said, he had to take his diagnostic machine offline for nearly 24 hours, after a four-day delay in the delivery of some single-use parts.

The shutdown forced Bihl to reduce testing appointments until the backlog could be made up, he said, adding that such shutdowns were taking place three or four times a month.

Arthur Clement, who runs four laboratories, said the U.S. manufacturer of his diagnostic machine, Cepheid, was sending him just 300 test kits per month at the end of the summer, as cases surged.

With his labs performing 25,000 tests per month, Clement had to send nearly all of them out to a third party, where they were taking up to 7-10 days to get results. Cepheid did not respond to a request for comment.

Clement ordered a new diagnostic machine from a South Korean manufacturer two months ago, which finally arrived last Friday, and now he says he can perform all tests in-house and deliver results in a day.

GLOBAL MARKET

In Paris, queues snake out of testing centers each day, with lines forming before sunrise at some. People with COVID symptoms are waiting on average three days for their results, according to official data, though for some the wait can be double.

France is now conducting more than 1.2 million polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests per week in response to the epidemic, which has killed more than 31,000 people in the country and infected nearly half a million.

The French health ministry denies that there is a nationwide shortage of chemicals. It says there have been localized shortages in some parts of the country, but the overall supply is adequate. Health Minister Olivier Veran has said France has access to supplies of reagents equivalent to double the actual demand for tests.

But laboratories can’t just order chemicals from anywhere: testing machines typically require proprietary chemical kits and tools, some of which can be obtained only from the manufacturer.

The ministry recommends laboratories diversify their suppliers of testing machines, to mitigate the risk of one supply chain becoming blocked. But that means buying extra machines to duplicate capacity, which costs more money and can take months.

Suppliers of the machines to French labs include Cepheid and Becton Dickinson in the United States, Switzerland’s Roche, and France’s Biomerieux and Eurobio Scientific.

Cepheid, Roche and Eurobio Scientific did not respond to requests for comment on the supply of COVID equipment and reagents.

Becton Dickinson told Reuters in an email it was delivering more than 1 million tests per month globally. It acknowledged that this has fallen short of demand, but said it aims to scale up to 1.9 million per month by late 2020.

Biomerieux said its sites in France had spare capacity.

Lionel Barrand, one of the five laboratory operators who spoke to Reuters, said the supply-chain crunch was partly rooted in France’s reliance on imported reagents. He estimated 90% of COVID-19 reagents used in France were sourced overseas.

“We depend heavily on the global market,” said Barrand, who heads a laboratory industry group, the Syndicat National des Jeunes Biologistes.

Some of the French laboratories worry that U.S. suppliers such as Cepheid and Becton Dickinson are prioritizing labs in the United States, where healthcare costs are higher and profit margins bigger.

Becton Dickinson said it allocates test kits using quotas, which are set on the basis of the number of its testing machines in a country and the severity of outbreaks.

“We do not use pricing, margins or profit as a factor in our allocations,” the company said.

(Reporting by Richard Lough; Additional reporting by Matthias Blamont; Editing by Peter Graff)