This is a historic day. The first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by U.S. Pfizer and German BioNTech arrived on Saturday, December 26, 2020. The doses are already stored in the huge warehouse of the central pharmacy of the Hôpitaux de Paris, where mountains of medicines are also kept.
The long-awaited vaccines have landed on French soil. They come from the Pfizer-BioNTech laboratories called «Comirnaty».The refrigerated truck was carrying 3,900 vials containing 19,500 doses of valuable carboice-covered serum, the carbonic snow that keeps the long-awaited products at about -80°C.
Once out of their storage area, vaccines can be stored for 5 days at a “positive cold” temperature between 2°C and 8°C, or that of a traditional refrigerator.
These high-surveillance vaccine doses are arriving on French soil as the French COVID-19 vaccination campaign is expected to start on Sunday, December 27, 2020. The first injections took place in two institutions for the elderly, in Sevran, Seine-Saint-Denis and Dijon.
France, like most countries in the European Union, has already lost more than 62,000 people killed after being infected with the coronavirus.
