While some regret that priority was not given to caregivers, the government and health authorities defend the choice of placing nursing homes in the forefront, advancing epidemiological arguments but also stock management.
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Sunday December 27, France will launch its vaccination campaign against Covid-19 in a handful of establishments for the elderly . A symbolic start with “a few dozen residents”, indicated the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, who intervenes “on the same day” in “all the countries of the European Union”. During this first phase targeting accommodation establishments for dependent elderly people (Ehpad) and long-term care units (USLD), staff from these structures who so wish can also receive the injection of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. , if they themselves have an increased risk of a serious form (age or underlying diseases). On December 24, the High Authority for Health (HAS) confirmed that Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty, the first anti-Covid vaccine validated by Europe, could “be used in people 16 years of age and over and including those over elderly because of its efficacy and its satisfactory tolerance profile “.
But in its vaccination strategy, unveiled on December 3, the executive did not choose to place all caregivers first. Priority was given to people for whom “the virus is the most dangerous”, insisted the Prime Minister, Jean Castex. The government has thus followed the recommendations of the High Authority for Health (HAS) , published on November 30, whose guideline was to” protect as a priority the most vulnerable and those who take care of them in order to reduce serious forms , hospitalizations and deaths “. However, age is the main risk factor for a severe form of the disease, the second being the existence of comorbidities, two factors accumulated by residents of nursing homes, whose community life also makes them more exposed.
“I am quite dismayed”
Without the question having aroused controversy in France, some experts regret that the government has not made the choice to vaccinate as a priority a majority of caregivers. “I’m pretty dismayed. What prevailed? A logic of dose management? In that case, it should be expressed like this. But why some European countries put caregivers first and not others? “, asks Gilles Pialoux, infectious disease doctor at the Tenon hospital (AP-HP), in Paris.
In Italy, doctors and health personnel, ie around 1.4 million people, will be the first to be vaccinated, followed by residents of residences for the elderly (570,000 people). Other countries are choosing to give simultaneous priority to health professionals and the elderly. In Germany, which will start its vaccination campaign like Italy and France on Sunday, the first group of beneficiaries includes residents of nursing homes, people over the age of 80, and health personnel, particularly those working in nursing units. intensive care or emergency, or in hematology or transplant medicine. Same strategy in the United Kingdom, the first Western country to have launched, on December 8, a massive vaccination campaign: residents of retirement homes are at the top of the priority groups, followed by hospital staff and those over 80 years old. /
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