- Seven weeks ago, President Emmanuel Macron announced a health pass.
- People need health passes to enter restaurants, bars, gyms or museums.
- A doctor in charge of the Paris intensive care unit said that the health pass will help control the fourth wave of the epidemic.
Despite weekly protests, France’s “Covid Health Pass” has helped this once-vaccinated country become a leader and won the majority of people’s support before next year’s presidential election.
Seven weeks after President Emmanuel Macron announced the news, French people are now accustomed to being required to show identification when entering restaurants, bars, stadiums or museums-polls show that most People are in favor of showing documents.
The system requires everyone to prove that they have been vaccinated or recently tested negative for Covid-19, or have recovered from the disease within the past six months.
Doctor and professor Djillali Annane, head of the intensive care unit at Raymond-Poincare de Garches Hospital in the Paris region, said: “In the beginning, it was not certain that it would work.”
“People have understood it, it is relatively well respected, and it is undeniable that it contributed to the temporary control of the fourth wave.”
Despite being criticized for discriminating against unvaccinated people, it has continued to promote France’s efforts to vaccinate its population since mid-July, with millions scrambling to get vaccinated to avoid regular testing.
Read | As France begins to implement the Covid Health Pass, new protests
According to official data analyzed by Agence France-Presse, as measured by the proportion of citizens who have received at least one dose of vaccine, France surpassed the United States and Germany at the end of July and early August, and surpassed the United Kingdom and Italy in recent days.
The country has received at least one dose of the vaccine for 72.1% of its population, and, like Sweden and Finland, it is achieving the highest vaccination rate in the European Union: 0.6% of the population is vaccinated once a day.
It still has the opportunity to make up for the shortage of top European vaccinators such as Spain, Malta and Portugal, where more than 80% of people received the first dose of vaccine, and Canada is still higher than France in the G7 wealthy group of countries.
-Political promotion-
Opinion polls show that for Macron, who is expected to seek re-election in the presidential election in April next year, the generally positive response to the pass system will help boost the government.
According to a recent survey by the Elabe Group, 64% to 77% of people support the pass, and confidence in the government’s handling of the health crisis is at the highest level since the pandemic began.
Bernard Sananes, head of Elabe, told AFP that the 43-year-old head of state will remain the “vulnerable darling” in the unpredictable poll next year because his record on Covid-19 will be reviewed.
He explained:
His impression is that he has passed the crisis so far, and has experienced some difficult moments-but left no room for alternatives, letting people say “So-and-so will do better.”
At the beginning of this year, when France began to lash out at people, progress was slow, and many experts thought Macron’s future was in jeopardy.
Other controversies, such as the lack of masks at the beginning of the crisis, provided ammunition for his opponents, including far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
-Ideological opposition? ——
The health pass system has aroused anger in some ways, leading to street demonstrations every Saturday, with opponents condemning the president for turning France into a “dictatorship.”
Some unvaccinated protesters even wore rhubarb stars to compare themselves with the persecuted Jews during World War II. Holocaust survivors criticized the similarity.
Read also | France protests Covid-19 “health pass” rules
Partly because of these extreme behaviors, the protest movement has never received widespread public support, which is different from other movements during the turbulent period of Macron’s administration, especially the anti-government “yellow vest” movement in 2018-19.
“For most people, taking out their mobile phones in front of the restaurant has become a daily habit. They did not follow the protesters into the realm of ideological debate,” Sanes said.
He said that the opposition is “a minority, but not marginal” and has the support of approximately 20-25% of French people.
With the reopening of schools and offices after the summer vacation, doctors are preparing for the possible increase of an average of approximately 17,000 cases per day.
The momentum of vaccination efforts is also expected to fade in the coming weeks, and fewer inspections and more cheating may also undermine the effectiveness of the health pass system.
Epidemiologist Catherine Hill said that all Covid-19 indicators are on a downward trend—from infection rates to deaths—but there are still about 19 million people who have not been vaccinated, half of whom are children under 12 years of age.
“The vector in the epidemic will be people who have not been vaccinated. There are nearly 20 million of them, and the virus can continue to spread in them,” she told AFP.
She added that regardless of short-term success, “we are all at the mercy of new variants.”
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