MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th April, 2021) France has vaccinated a record number of people - 437,000 - in one day, on Thursday, French Health Minister Olivier Veran said on Friday.
"With a record of 437,000 injections yesterday, the vaccination campaign is accelerating and protecting our citizens more and more," Veran wrote on Twitter, adding that 1.3 million vaccines were delivered in two days to pharmacists, doctors, and private duty nurses.
He also said live on the RTL broadcaster that the government planned to vaccinate 20 million of the French population by mid-May. Besides, the minister noted that the country's National Authority for Health will later on Friday issue a recommendation for some 600,000 French citizens under the age of 55 who were first inoculated with the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to choose another vaccine for the second dose as a precautionary measure.
The latter also applies to Veran himself, as he has been administered the first AstraZeneca shot in early February. The measure is linked to reports of blood clot events that occurred after the use of the vaccine, leading to a halt in vaccine rollout last month in a number of European countries, including France.
However, the use of the vaccine was later resumed in the French immunization campaign, which kicked off in late December. Earlier this week, the EU drug watchdog concluded that cases of post-vaccination blood clotting should be listed as "very rare side effects" of the vaccine.
Apart from the AstraZeneca-made vaccine, France's immunization campaign includes vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical companies. To date, 10,114, 284 people received at least one of the two-dose coronavirus vaccine while a total of 3,484,006 people have been fully inoculated.
