Swabs
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The big brands have been asking since last spring to be able to market these popular devices as Christmas Eve approaches. They offer to sell them at cost price, an approach that is not disinterested.
For the moment, the announcement has gone unheeded. Last week, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, assured that access to self-tests “Was going to be facilitated” so that “The French can be massively tested before the end of the year celebrations”. A statement that has not escaped the supermarket chains who, since last spring, ask to be able to sell them and who have already seen some hopes showered.
In mid-March, the Director General of Health, Jérôme Salomon, announces the upcoming marketing of self-tests “In supermarkets and pharmacies”. The Carrefour group then jumped at the opportunity and ordered no less than a million. Before biting its fingers: the government backpedals and decrees that they will ultimately only be sold in pharmacies “to begin with”.
Except that this first step has been going on for almost nine months. And if the hitherto mixed success of these tests less precise than PCR or antigenic had rather weakened the interest that the mass distribution had in them, the situation is quite different today. “With the omicron variant, the new wave and the holidays coming, everyone is rushing on it!” Demand has increased sixfold in one month ”, notes Oren Bitton, director …