Doses shortfall, delivery delay cast doubt over France's vaccination rollout

However, low vaccine deliveries are likely to cast doubt into the country's vaccination plan and delay an eventual return to normalcy, according to Jean-Francois Delfraissy, head of the scientific council that advises the government on the epidemic.

"Vaccine supply is going to be slower than what we had imagined... We will not have a shortage of vaccine, but we will have something that will be more spread out over time," Delfraissy told BFMTV television earlier this week.

In his estimation, France would vaccinate between 6 and 8 million people by mid-April, lower than the government's target of 15 million, and "about 40 percent of the population by the end of summer, but not more."

The less optimistic scenario was due to supplies' delay that drug companies announced. The US drugmaker Pfizer recently said it would slow down its deliveries to the European Union (EU) at the end of January and early February to upgrade its production facilities in Belgium in order to ramp up shipments later on.

In a further blow, AstraZeneca, which developed a vaccine with the University of Oxford, unveiled last week it would cut supplies by the first quarter to the EU which had ordered at least 300 million doses provided that the vaccine is approved as safe and effective.

As a result, some vaccination centers in France were forced to delay the first injection due to doses shortfall.

It's the case in Bas-Rhin near German borders, one of the worst-hit zones by the coronavirus. The region's nine vaccination centers were forced to shut down on Jan 25 and 26 to space out the appointments to ensure that the most vulnerable people can get the second shot.

In Ile-de-France, one of France's most populated regions, it's impossible to make an appointment for a first dose in the coming month, according to Doctolib online reservation platform.

"We would need to vaccinate several hundred thousand people per day to try to have a strong impact on this epidemic as quickly as possible. So there are still efforts to be made," Pascal Crepey, an epidemiologist, told Franceinfo radio on Monday.

"The impact of vaccination is immediate, but to observe it on a large scale there must be at least 15 percent, 20 percent of the population at risk who is vaccinated," he said.

According to data posted on Tuesday on Our World in Data website, 1.75 percent of French people have been inoculated so far, versus 10.79 percent in the United Kingdom, 2.76 percent in Spain and 2.29 percent in Germany.