France is overhauling its Covid-19 immunisation campaign after a cautious, phased strategy aimed at placating the world’s most vaccine-sceptical population fell flat in its first week, reports the Financial Times.
The country has only vaccinated some 350 people to date — compared with the UK’s 1m and Germany’s 238,000 — although the government has received 500,000 doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine and will get a similar amount each week in January.
The situation is piling pressure on President Emmanuel Macron and risks sparking another political fight over how the government has managed the pandemic.
Opposition politicians have criticised the government over how it bungled mask supplies and struggled to roll out mass testing last year.
Axel Kahn, a prominent French geneticist, at the weekend called the slow start “a disaster” and blamed excessive government bureaucracy, while the National Academy of Medicine, the doctors’ organisation, said there was “no more time to waste” given that about 300 people were dying of the virus in France each day.
The country’s Covid-19 death toll is nearly 65,000 people so far. Despite two national lockdowns and ongoing restrictions, it has the highest case count in western Europe, according to Johns Hopkins data.
Read more of this report from the Financial Times.
See Mediapart's coverage of the background here.