Concerns Rise Over Delayed Flu Vaccination Campaign in France

2023-12-01 11:43:45
NICOLAS MAETERLINCK / AFP Pharmacists’ unions are concerned about a delay in flu vaccination. The Minister of Health, Aurélien Rousseau, also sounded the alert this Thursday, November 30. (Illustrative photo).

NICOLAS MAETERLINCK / AFP

Pharmacists’ unions are concerned about a delay in flu vaccination. The Minister of Health, Aurélien Rousseau, also sounded the alert this Thursday, November 30. (Illustrative photo).

HEALTH – The tone is set and the alarm is raised. The Minister of Health, Aurélien Rousseau, expressed his concern this Thursday, November 30 about the figures “mediocre” of the flu vaccination campaign, which began on October 17 and will end on December 15. There are therefore only fifteen days left to recover and try to avoid a massive epidemic wave.

“This is now worrying. We need a start. Otherwise, it is the hospital and the most vulnerable who will pay a high price for all this. “, he continued. This alert echoes the arrival of winter and the remark of Public Health France which already notes a “slight increase in the majority of indicators of influenza and influenza-like illness” in France.

In son bulletin from November 20 to 26, 2023, SPF notes that the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Île-de-France and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regions have entered “in the pre-epidemic phase”.

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500,000 fewer vaccinated patients

For more than ten days, pharmacists have also been providing feedback which attests to a delay in vaccination compared to last year. “If nothing is done, we will end the season with a million fewer flu vaccinations than last year! »warned Philippe Besset, the president of the Federation of Pharmaceutical Unions of France (FSPF) to the Parisian. The 2022-2023 campaign made it possible to vaccinate 51.5% of the 18 million people considered at risk, which was already far from the 75% mark desired by the WHO.

Effectively, as you can see in the graph belowpublished by science journalist Nicolas Berrod, 8.3 million doses were injected by pharmacists on the 43rd day of the vaccination campaign, compared to 8.9 million at the same time in 2022. The gap has widened significantly for a ten days.

Data from the Union of Community Pharmacists’ Unions also shows a “flu vaccination delay of almost 5 points compared to 2022 in the general population”a delay of almost « 500 000 patients »she wrote in a communiqué. Or, “according to epidemiologists, 500,000 fewer doses administered cause 1,000 more hospitalizations and a few hundred additional deaths,” deplores Philippe Besset, on TF1.

Reluctance to double vaccination

To explain this decline in vaccination, health professionals put forward multiple reasons. Pierre-Olivier Variot, president of the Uspo union, discusses a problem « technique » in the organization of the vaccination campaign. “ This year the target audiences received their vaccination voucher very early, around a month and a half before the start of the campaign. They came to see us, we sent them home and then they forgot,” he regrets in L’Express, judging that the ideal would be that “people can collect their vaccine in pharmacies as soon as they receive the voucher”.

Philippe Besset explains this delay for three reasons. First, a “vaccine fatigue” French people, already forced to a demanding vaccination schedule during the Covid pandemic. Second, a lack of effective communication from health authorities on the importance of the flu vaccine. On this point, the Ministry of Health defended to the Parisian that Health Insurance should, from next week, more “encourage those who have not yet been vaccinated to take the plunge”.

Finally, the president of the FSPF believes that vaccination against Covid is also responsible for the fact that that of the flu is slipping. “ It’s a bit complicated to tell the French that we are going to vaccinate them against Covid in one arm and flu in the other on the same day”, he explains to TF1. Covid vaccination also seems to be doing better than that of the flu this year. Since the fall, more than 3.2 million people aged 65, or nearly 22% of this public, have been vaccinated against the coronavirus. In 2022, at the same period, there were only 2 million.

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