“We remain in tension but there is room for all those who wish to be vaccinated today”, assures Matthieu Bécamel, communications director of the Maiia platform, which makes it possible to reserve vaccination slots near home. The government on Wednesday, December 22 opened vaccination for children aged 5 to 11, adding that “the booster is very effective even against the Omicron variant”.
Franceinfo: Have you noticed a start in reservations since the green light from the Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS) or is it still a bit shy?
Matthieu Bécamel: It’s a bit early to give figures because the announcement was only communicated late Wednesday morning to all health professionals and so it will take a little time. Especially since, since the announcement, it is necessary that the centers [de vaccination] activate a pattern dedicated to the first injection for the 5 to 11 year old population. Beyond this simple gesture, it is necessary to set up pediatric lines. In other words, when you go to a vaccination center, you need a specific route for the children to be taken care of. You have to take time to explain to the children how it’s going to be. There are forms to fill out, there is a somewhat cumbersome form of logistics. In addition, the doses could be called since December 13 but concretely, the bulk of the doses for children will arrive from December 24. So by the time all this is put in place, it will stammer a little so that it all starts with great fanfare, from my point of view, at the beginning of the year 2022.
One of the axes of the government’s strategy in the face of this fifth wave and the potential Omicron wave is to promote the booster dose. There was a very strong start when it was extended to the entire population. Are we staying on a high rate of reservations?
We always have this “rebound effect” after each speech. Each time, we have crowds and the French systematically respond to the government’s calls for vaccination. The pace is high but there was a bottleneck with many French people who mobilized. Now, it has reduced a little bit even if we are on a routine where a lot of slots are reserved. We remain in tension but there is room for all those who wish to be vaccinated today. On our Maiia platform, we don’t have a traffic jam problem. It is the centers that have control over the niches that they open to the public. Depending on the doses they have received, from their staff, they will open a number of slots that correspond to their vaccination capacity.
At the very beginning, there were a lot of niches in the big cities, a little less for the more medium-sized cities and the rural areas. Is this still the case today or has it rebalanced?
The distribution was made at the regional level so that, normally, the centers are proportional to the number of French people who live in those regions, so it is supposed to level out in each of the regions. The other trick put in place by the government is vaccination in town from pharmacists. Even if, all of us today bring back the load [de travail] is dense with all the other actions they have to do in the winter period, overall, you can get vaccinated in a pharmacy or simply from your doctor. Somehow, city medicine takes precedence over the vaccination that can be done in vaccination centers.