France Health Minister Olivier Veran said on Monday that his country to reach its target of vaccinating 1 million people against COVID-19 by the end of January and has enough doses to increase the total to 2.4 million by the end of February. During a visit to a vaccination centre in the eastern city of Grenoble, Veran told reporters that France had now set up about 800 such centres.
But France still trails far behind several other European countries such as Britain, where the number of people who have received a first dose of the vaccination had reached 3.2 million by Friday. In Germany and Italy, more than 1 million people had been vaccinated at the end of last week. Veran said the main challenge in France - which has reported nearly 3 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, the highest in the Europe Union - was not the logistics of the vaccination process but the delivery of doses.
A new delivery of the vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech would arrive this week and more would be arriving in coming weeks, he said. With the vaccines already at its disposal, France will be able to have vaccinated 2.4 million people by the end of February, Veran said.
That total could rise to 4 million once vaccines it has ordered from other pharmaceutical companies are approved by health authorities, he said. On Thursday, Veran said France was being supplied with 500,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine per week, an amount that will rise to 1 million per week, and that he hoped 5 million people in France will have been vaccinated by Easter.
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