Four months after his last speech, Emmanuel Macron will again address the French. The Head of State will speak on Tuesday, November 9 at 8 p.m. in the context of the resumption of the Covid-19 epidemic. Main stake of this intervention: accelerate the vaccine recall campaign officially launched since September 1. In France, according to figures from the Ministry of Health,
88% of people over 18 are now fully vaccinated.
But the administration of a third dose recommended since the end of August by the High Authority for Health (HAS), is progressing slowly. Too slowly in the eyes of some professionals who now plead for a generalization of the booster of anticovid vaccine
for the whole population. As winter approaches, the indicators show an increase in hospital admissions, the incidence rate and cases of contamination. In this context, the Prime Minister called on Friday for “general mobilization around vaccination”.
Focus on the unvaccinated
As is often the case during the epidemic, opinions from the scientific community diverge on the impact of this famous third dose. Will its rapid and massive administration for the population categories concerned be enough to stem the resumption of the epidemic? For now, less than half of eligible people, that is to say those over 65 and the most fragile, have received their booster dose.
Nothing alarming for epidemiologist Dominique Costagliola. According to her, the action of the health authorities should rather focus on the unvaccinated. “We have 13% of those over 80 who have not been vaccinated, that’s already what should be solved as a problem,” she explained on France Inter, Saturday, November 6. A point of view shared by his colleague Alain Fischer, the “Mr. vaccination” of the government who insisted in the columns of the Sunday Newspaper on the priority of convincing this percentage of unvaccinated elderly people.
Reinforced immunity
Others, on the contrary, plead to give a boost to the booster vaccination. This is the case of Benjamin Davido, crisis medical director and infectious disease specialist at the Raymond Poincaré hospital in Garches (Hauts-de-Seine). Contacted by 20 minutes, he explains: “Today, the problem is the rate of transmission of the virus. And it does not only concern the oldest or the most fragile among us. As we now know, with the Delta variant, the antibodies drop after six months after a complete vaccination schedule. So to avoid a resurgence of the epidemic, a return of restrictions and maintain the benefits of this vaccination, a new reminder schedule should be determined for all ”.
In Israel, one of the most proactive countries on anti-ovid vaccination, a recent study published at the end of October in the review The Lancet was interested in the effects of the triple injection. There, the booster dose has been available to the entire population for three months.
In an interview with Release this Sunday, immunologist and professor at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Cyrille Cohen, presented the results of his research. “We see a drop in immunity linked to the vaccination after six months. A booster dose brings this immunity back to its level after the second dose. If we compare two populations, one vaccinated twice and the other three times, we notice that the booster is 90% effective against severe forms and 80% against death, ”he explains.
Appointments on the rise
In France, the generalization of a third dose has not yet been recorded by the executive. But the subject could be discussed Tuesday morning on the occasion of a new health defense council chaired by Emmanuel Macron. Dominique Costagliola, she insists on the need to combine all the health instructions to keep the epidemic resurgence at bay. “This generalization of the third dose is without urgency. For the moment, the vaccine schedules adopted remain very effective against the serious forms (…) we must not abandon the other measures, the mask and aeration, we really have to combine everything to reduce the risks as much as possible ”, he added. -she raised on France Inter.
However, as last July, the announcement of a new presidential intervention seems to have encouraged several thousand French people, affected by this new dose, to act. And the possibility of conditioning the health pass to this booster dose mentioned Friday by Jean Castex would not be nothing either. According to the Doctolib site, more than 63,000 appointments for a vaccine booster
were taken last Friday, day when we learned the upcoming intervention of Emmanuel Macron. This is 61% more compared to the previous week.