I hadn’t realised that it was open to the over 65s now! I had to tick various boxes to confirm eligibility. Must get OH to look…
From the BBC,
France is on track to reach its target of vaccinating 1 million people against COVID-19 by the end of January and has enough doses to increase the total to 2.4 million by the end of February, health minister Olivier Veran said on Monday.
Stretching the interval to 12 weeks is not a terrible idea - just not supported by the trial data and it does allow more people to get some protection early.
The French numbers are individual doses as well, not completed 2-dose courses so are directly comparable. I hope that the French ramp up though because delivered doses really do need to be ~500k per day to do a whole population in a sensible time frame.
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I was just going to post that one dose does give some immunity after around 14 days so it isn’t that wrong to say people have been vaccinated
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Many of them simply don’t think they will catch it, like my eighties friend and neighbour.
But she should have been informed and not left to turn up for a non-existent appointment.
The problem is that we don’t know how long that immunity lasts - they did some extrapolation from the trial data which got them out to 28 days, I’m less clear what data they looked at to conclude 12 weeks is OK.
That noted - as I said above it’s not a terrible idea, 3 weeks for the 2nd dose is pretty short as far as most vaccination schedules go and might have been chosen due to the compressed time-frame available for the trials, it’s just that we don’t know for certain.
There has been inconsistency though - as Warren notes some areas continued with the 3-week schedule, some didn’t. My original dose was delayed 2 days which turned out to be quite annoying in that on the original schedule I’d have had the 2nd dose but it fell 24 hours after the cut off for having to wait 3 weeks 
Quite agree, but we don’t know that the didn’t try to contact her and not get through.
It is more likely in these times that anyone trying to contact a government department will fail as opposed to the other way round.
I heard on the radio that 3,000 people a week are contacting the Health and Safety Executive to say that they don’t feel Covid safe in their workplace, yet no prosecutions have been undertaken so far and apparently employers feel secure enough that they carry on as they do not fear any inspections.
A total about turn from a Department that previously seemed set up to cause trouble for minor infractions.
A lot of my colleagues who had side effects,got them from the second dose,after three weeks
What sort of things Eddie?
Flu type symptoms,but very short lasting and no one has said they regret having it
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For people that I know directly there seems to be more reaction in BAME groups, I got away with a sore arm for a couple of days. Somewhat expected more from the 2nd dose but will have to wait untio 1st March to find out. If there’s any vaccine left by then, of course.
No one knows yet if this will be an annual thing or not
One aspect of the UK’s apparent vaccination success that interests me - and that I haven’t seen discussed here or in other media - is that unlike previous failures (such as PPE procurement, or the ‘world-beating’ test and trace system) the vaccination programme is being undertaken, both in terms of management and delivery, by the state, not the cowboy capitalist contractors usually favoured by the Tories. I wonder if they’ll draw any lessons from the fact that it actually seems to be working?
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Sure, I get that. But if in 12 weeks the UK says it’s vaccinated eg 10million, and France eg 4million the difference will look stark. But if few in the UK have had more than 1 dose, and most in France have had both doses then this is not an equal comparison - but the UK will no doubt ignore that detail.
My major area of concern is the frightening statistic (given by the GMB Union, following a survey of their membership) that Ambulance staff are immensely stressed to the point of fearing for their lives and those of their immediate family to the point of stressing about going out on call from their stations.
And once they are out, the distressing scenes they face when lined up at casualty units with seriously ill patients on board dying before reaching triage. There is at least one report of a taxi pulling up in an ambulance bay with a deceased person on board. The relatives phoned for a taxi to go to the hospital as no Ambulance was expected to be available for a considerable number of hours.
Suggestions that Police Officers will drive ambulances to fill the gap is laughable… will they issue FP notices to cadavers if they fail to stay alive long enough to get to medical care?
Cheap comment, I know… but how is shortening the time it takes to get an ambulance to a emergency call with an inexperienced para-medic on board going to help when all it may serve to do is lengthen the queue of ambulances outside A&E?
And the UK Govt has still not addressed the issue of relevant PPE for Ambulance staff 
dreadful!
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Going back to what I wrote about the now availability for over 65s … I just logged in and as the Doctolib site has my date of birth so I have assumed it gave me the first available legitimate rdv.
True, but France (at 422,000 vaccinated) is also behind Italy (1.1 million), Germany (1.05 million) and Spain (768,000) where France has less wriggle room to say “oui, mais seulement une dose”.
Did you get the eligibility questions? You can log in to Doctolib to book appointments for others, we only have one account between us, so I tried for OH but couldn’t legitimately tick the boxes necessary to confirm the rdv.
There was the list of eligibility, and then this…
“En cliquant sur “J’accepte”, je certifie sur l’honneur que le patient respecte bien ces conditions d’éligibilité. Ces conditions d’éligibilité sont validées par le ministère de la santé et sont amenées à évoluer dans les semaines qui viennent.
Si vous n’êtes pas encore éligible à la vaccination, la prise de rendez-vous vous sera ouverte ultérieurement.”
So it’s down to you to check you are eligible, not an algorithm.