“The limit of 50,000 vaccines” against monkeypox in France was exceeded on Monday, Health Minister François Braun announced Tuesday in Montpellier during a visit to one of the 188 vaccination centers against this disease. “Yesterday we passed the 50,000 vaccination mark, making France one of the countries in the world where we vaccinate the most, along with the United States,” he said.
He added that France was “also one of the first to have implemented preventive vaccination and the only one to provide this vaccination completely free of charge.”
“We have vaccinated a lot and we can still vaccinate: our 188 vaccination centers are ready, they have vaccines, we have the capacity to vaccinate, there are vaccination places available in all these centers,” the minister continued.
Refuses to accept “the term ignition delay”
He explained that he could not “accept the term delayed ignition”: “We started very quickly. (…) I arrived on July 4, and from the 10th we began vaccination.”
More than 100,000 doses of vaccines have been delivered to these centers, Public Health France said on Friday, adding that 2,889 confirmed cases of monkeypox had been identified as of Thursday. With 50,000 vaccines in total, France would still be far from the 37,000 weekly vaccines requested by the associations to allow vaccination before the end of the summer of the entire public considered at risk of contamination.
Since July 11, vaccination against monkeypox has been offered nationwide to men who have sex with men and trans people who declare they have multiple sexual partners, sex workers and professionals who work in places of sexual consumption.
This target population was estimated in July, for men who have had sex with men with multiple partners in the last six months alone, at “some 250,000 people,” by the High Authority for Health (HAS).
Source: BFM TV
