Since the start of the pandemic, the Moselle department has often appeared in red on the map of France. First because of the saturation of its hospitals during the first wave, then because of the prevalence of the South African variant, in February. Situation which had led the High Authority of Health (HAS) to recommend the use of messenger RNA vaccines in the department, their effectiveness against this variant being demonstrated. As part of this recommendation, the Ministry of Health launched, on April 23, an experiment in Moselle, allowing general practitioners and pharmacists to administer the Moderna vaccine. It should be extended to the rest of the national territory by June.
So far, outside the Moselle, only AstraZeneca and Janssen vaccines are available to town doctors and pharmacists. The logistical constraints linked to the storage of messenger RNA vaccines at very low temperatures have led the authorities to reserve their use for vaccination centers. But Moderna’s vaccine is less complex to store and transport than Pfizer’s. It can be stored for seven months at – 25 ° C and – 15 ° C and thirty days at 2 ° C and 8 ° C, in a doctor’s refrigerator, for example. Hence this experiment in Moselle.
An application for routing
It remained to invent a delivery circuit. “In one week, we imagined a computer application capable of connecting volunteer doctors and pharmacists with distributors”, explains Guilaine Kiffer-Desgripes, president of the Regional Union of Health Professionals (URPS) liberal doctors of the Grand Est. The Distrivac application works very simply: volunteer doctors and pharmacists register on the platform and then order. The doses are sent frozen to the wholesalers, then they are thawed and transported to nearby pharmacies. “Distrivac allows us to precisely trace each dose. There is no loss ”, assures Dr. Kiffer-Desgripes.
“It worked very well, confirms Christophe Wilcke, president of the URPS pharmacists of the Grand Est. On Monday, the professionals placed an order. The doses arrived at wholesalers on Wednesday, then in pharmacies on Thursday. And we did the injections on Friday. “ Jean-Daniel Gredeler, general practitioner in Saint-Privat-la-Montagne, vaccinated eleven patients as part of this experiment. “Obviously, this requires a bit of anticipation and organization, he admits. As with AstraZeneca, you have to be very careful in scheduling appointments, as all doses must be administered during the day. But I have the chance to work in a nursing home, it’s a real plus. “
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