Paris, France | AFP | Tuesday 30/06/2020 – The president of the territorial community of Guyana, Rodolphe Alexandre, and the two LREM senators from this territory “demanded” Tuesday that the therapeutic trial conducted by Professor Karine Lacombe, consisting in injecting patients suffering from Covid-19 plasma from cured patients, “does not take place in Guyana”.
“We demanded that Professor Lacombe’s mission not take place in Guyana. It is not welcome and we asked the prefect to make all the arrangements so that it is not welcomed in Guyana,” explained Rodolphe Alexandre, surrounded by senators Georges Patient and Antoine Karam, in a video broadcast after an appointment with the prefect and the director of the Regional Health Agency (ARS) Wednesday evening (Thursday morning in Paris) .
The plan to extend this therapeutic trial, already underway in mainland France, to Guyana and Mayotte, was announced on June 25 by Ms. Lacombe during a hearing at the National Assembly, but this initiative aroused strong opposition in Guyana, where some refuse to be “guinea pigs”.
In a letter to the director of the ARS of Guyana, the GDR deputy of Guyana Gabriel Serville acts “his breach of confidence”: “Where did you get this unilateral idea that the Guyanese figures would justify the installation of a therapeutic center instead of hexagonal France? he asks, arguing that on June 29, Guyana had “only 120 hospitalizations, including 19 in intensive care”, while the metropolis still had on June 26 “8.886 people hospitalized and 634 in intensive care. ”
Guyana had a total of 3,774 cases and 15 deaths on Monday.
“The worrying advance of the epidemic (…) cannot, however, make Guyana a playground” for “French researchers”, Senator Karam had already written on Monday in a letter to the minister of Health Olivier Véran.
Launched on April 7 by the French Blood Establishment (EFS), the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) and Inserm, this trial consists of injecting patient plasma with Covid-19 cured, containing antibodies to the coronavirus.
About 200 cured patients were to be collected in Ile-de-France, Grand-Est and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, while the trial was to include 120 patients in the acute phase of Covid-19: 60 receiving plasma and 60 , a placebo.
But this figure has not yet been reached, said Ms. Lacombe, because when the trial was launched in early April “we were already in the phase of deceleration of the epidemic”, and that many patients arrived at the hospital at that time did not meet “the inclusion criteria for benefiting from the plasma test”.
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