“If we have a new pandemic, we can produce 100 million masks per week in France”, assures a professional in the sector

Five years after the start of confinement, the French health masks is said to be ready in the event of a new epidemic.

On March 17, 2020 began an unprecedented confinement throughout France, to limit the effects of the Cavid-19 pandemic. At the time, the question of the supply of masks arose, faced with the lack of strategic stocks and production capacities. Emmanuel Macron had then set the goal of a “full independence“France by the end of 2020.

Five years later, at Prism, one of the manufacturers who remain, in Frontignan (Hérault), “The pace to date is similar to that during the pandemic. We have maintained the same level of production”Assures Jérome Yvanez, the commercial director. The company, which has a dozen employees, produces around 600,000 surgical masks per week, and 700,000 FFP2, these masks that are both a little more sophisticated and more protective.

Customers consists in particular of hospitals, whose calls for tenders for so -called sovereign purchases (masks, gloves or pockets) must include a clause in a European preference and meet various environmental, technical or social criteria. It is, for French companies, the only possibility of surviving in the face of competition from Chinese masks, sold less than two cents per unit, almost half cheaper than French masks.

At Prism, the whole raw material is Made in France, underlines the president of the company, Christian Curel, who also chairs the union of French manufacturers of masks: “The outer layers of the masks are made in the North, the interior layers in Besançon, the nasal bars in Alsace and the elastic bands next to Saint-Etienne.”

“France is the only European country to have kept a sector, there is no longer in other countries.”

Christian Curel, President of Prism

in franceinfo

Among the objectives, there is the planned reconstruction of the strategic stock by the State, that is to say 1.3 billion masks to be provided. An essential manna of orders for French manufacturers, including only five or six are still actually active today. Christian Curel wants to be rather serene, however, in the event of a new pandemic: some, who preferred to stop their machines for lack of order and sufficient margins, could restart them if necessary within fairly short deadlines. “There are twelve sites that can be considered as ‘industrial production industrial sites’. This is enough, if we have a new pandemic, to produce 100 million masks per week.”

And even if no scenario can be excluded, companies in the mask sector have all started diversification of activity. For example around disinfection materials, in the case of PRISM.