Protecting people at risk of serious forms is HAS’ priority objective. The next step, according to the High Health Authority is to allow the entourage of fragile people to be vaccinated, she explained in a press release.
If the vaccination against Covid protects against severe forms, “preliminary data also suggest effects on the risk of transmission of the virus“, underlines the HAS. Although partial, these encouraging data allow the HAS to adjust its vaccination strategy and to recommend the vaccination of the entourage of certain fragile people. The recommendation concerns in particular the entourage of immunocompromised, elderly people , with loss of autonomy, with disabilities, often supervised by caregivers or professionals from the health and medico-social sector.
The cocooning strategy
The top priority would be immunocompromised patients : “persons transplanted with solid organs or haematopoietic stem cells, undergoing lymphopenic chemotherapy, receiving treatment with anti-CD20 and chronic dialysis patients, under immunosuppressants not belonging to these categories or carriers of a primary immunodeficiency, after advice specialized”.
Because, reminds the HAS, these patients are doubly vulnerable. Even vaccinated, the protection would not be sufficient. To optimize it, it would be necessary that the adults and children who gravitate around these patients see their risks of transmitting the virus reduced to the maximum. A strategy called “cocooning”.
Would be concerned all people living under the same roof as the patientbut also those allowing care, from health personnel, through carers, home helpers, or even the people who look after the children of these families.
THE virus would be further blocked in its transmission by messenger RNA vaccines and more specifically by the Janssen vaccine. The latter is therefore recommended for this type of vaccine strategy.
Source : HAS, Vaccines against Covid-19: protecting the most vulnerable through those around them, April 30, 2021.
Read also:
- Covid-19: can the virus be transmitted after being vaccinated?
- Covid-19: it spreads more easily by talking than by coughing
