This time the shortage of flu vaccine is evident: “The waiting lists are overflowing”

“It’s okay to announce that we will have a coronavirus vaccine, but we should already be able to be vaccinated against the flu. How do you want us to believe it?” Jean-Claude Ratinaud is disillusioned. This octogenarian inhabitant of Blagnac, is vaccinated annually against influenza. But this time he is just waiting, on the waiting list of his pharmacy for weeks without having been able to receive the precious injection yet.

“I don’t call them every day, but always regularly, and they always answer the same thing: they are waiting”. They are waiting to receive new doses not yet delivered to all pharmacies in France, during this famous November replenishment, the second wave of vaccine distribution, after the first was a resounding success. In October 7,645 million frail patients were vaccinated, up from 4,668 million in October 2019.

“We have already sold everything”

But even where vaccine deliveries were completed in November, the shortage is a reality, as confirmed by Jean-Marie Guillermin, vice president of the Order of Pharmacists of Occitania and owner of a dispensary in the center. -toulousin the city. “We received the rest of our vaccine orders in November, but our waiting list was such that we have all reviewed them with these patients and we don’t have any others already, as we continue to receive vaccine seekers.”

To satisfy them, Jean-Marie Guillermin simply has to wait for the delivery of the stock made up by the state (estimated at 2.5 million doses), whose distribution methods are not yet known: “Noi announces us at the beginning of December and we are told that all pharmacies will receive the same, which should represent a hundred doses per pharmacy, but we do not yet know how it will all happen, it is a bit of artistic vagueness that I reign. “

The faulty state?

And even with the hundred doses promises, not everyone can be served, warns pharmacist. So much so that he stopped taking new names in his waiting list. “I do not see me promise them a vaccine that is not safe to give him.”

Faced with this deficiency that we can no longer ignore, Jean-Marie Guillermin blames the state for its poor organization and lack of organization. “Other countries were able to place orders much earlier, unlike us who placed them in August,” says the pharmacist. Result: we can only hope now to have these doses promised by the state available to customers, and not too late, because it is in December that those who do not yet have it will have to be vaccinated. summer…”