The start of the school year has not yet started and the covid has already returned, thanks to a new variant, Eris. The vaccination campaign should begin in the fall. “The first doses of vaccine will arrive in pharmacies from mid-October, specifies Philippe Besset, the president of the Federation of Pharmaceutical Unions of France. The covid vaccination campaign will take place at the same time as the flu vaccination and will target the same audiences”. The High Authority of Health recommends this year only people over 65 and vulnerable people to be injected with a booster dose.
Pfizer’s vaccine will be the only one available in pharmacies in the fall, the laboratory having won the call for tenders issued by the European Union to the detriment of its competitors, including Moderna.
The vaccines about to be marketed should be effective against the Eris variant, which is spreading rapidly in France. According to Reuters, Pfizer said on Thursday that the most recent version of its vaccine, tailored to be effective against Omicron, has shown efficacy against Eris in tests with mice. Moderna, on the other hand, sees a “robust immune response,” both against Eris, the variant now dominant in the US, and against Fornax, another variant growing in some US states. “These new results reflect the ability of our vaccine to deal with the threat of new variants of covid 19,” said Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna. Eris is a derivative of the XBB.1.5 subline of the Omicron variant.
France is currently experiencing a resurgence of contamination with the covid virus. According to Public Health France, its incidence is slightly increasing in all age groups. “The slight increase in indicators already observed in previous weeks continues but the indicators still remain at low levels”, notes the organization. The incidence rate of covid 19 in France has increased from 7.7 to 12.3 laboratory-confirmed cases per 100,000 inhabitants – this represented 8,351 cases only last week.
For laboratories that have developed a vaccine against covid, however, the good times have passed. Results from Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are hurt by falling demand for vaccines. In the second quarter, Moderna posted a quarterly net loss of $ 1.4 billion, and sales related to Covid vaccines of 293 million, down 94%. At Pfizer too, sales of the Comirnaty vaccine fell by 64% over one year.
In the United States, however, Moderna has revised its vaccine sales forecast upwards to a range between 6 and 8 billion dollars for the year 2023. In France, only a fraction of the population is called upon to be vaccinated. . “But this population, which is also vaccinated against the flu, is generally respectful of the recommendations of the High Authority for Health, explains Philippe Besset. It is also easier to get people to accept a vaccination at the rate of once a year than every three months as before”.
There remains the unknown of the emergence of new variants resistant to vaccines. The World Health Organization and US health authorities announced on Friday that they are closely monitoring a new variant of the Covid-19 virus with a “very large number (greater than 30) of mutations in the Spike gene it carries”. This new variant has so far only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States.