Pfizer ‘on track’ with vaccine deliveries to France

Pfizer is on track to meet its targets of vaccine dose deliveries to France and the EU, David Lepoittevin, director of the vaccines division at the French subsidiary of the American laboratory Pfizer, told Franceinfo.

In mid-January, Pfizer announced that its shipments of doses would be affected as it was making changes to its manufacturing process to boost production.

This led to France receiving 300,000 fewer Pfizer vaccine doses than expected in January.

But Mr Lepoittevin said the situation is now resolved.

“To be able to readjust our lines from a quality point of view, we had to reduce the pace and therefore slow down deliveries over a week. Today, we are in line with the objectives we had set ourselves.

“Our objective is to be able to deliver 5 million doses to France by the end of February, 9 million by the end of March and 27 million doses... by the end of June,” he said.

Pfizer-BioNTech announced on February 1 that it would supply 75 million extra doses of its vaccine to the EU in the second quarter of 2021.

This would bring the total number of doses due to be delivered by the middle of the year up to 600 million, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated.

France will also start to produce Covid-19 vaccinations at four pharmaceutical sites starting at the end of February to the beginning of March, President Emmanuel Macron has confirmed.

Of the four sites, three are subcontractors, which will manufacture vaccines developed by other laboratories. These are factories belonging to the labs Delpharm, Recipharm and Fareva.

They will finalise production at the end of the manufacturing chain. Delpharm will work on the Pfizer/BioNTech jab, Recipharm on Moderna, and Fareva on the CureVac vaccine.

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