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VACCINE

OPINION: France is much less vaccine-shy than previously feared, but can it reach 90 percent coverage?

The other day I joined the more than 14 million French people who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, writes John Lichfield. Whilst in the nurse’s waiting room, I overheard - all right I eavesdropped on - a conversation between several already-jabbed or soon-to-be-jabbed Normans.

Published: 10 June 2021 12:52 CEST
Updated: 12 June 2021 10:38 CEST
OPINION: France is much less vaccine-shy than previously feared, but can it reach 90 percent coverage?
Photo: Olivier Morin/AFP

The conversation was broadly as follows: “I wasn’t going to bother with being vaccinated. I didn’t like the idea much.”

“Me neither”.

“Anyway, in the end, I thought, oh well, it will make it easier to travel this summer and maybe do other stuff. I’m still unhappy about it. But what can you do?”

While she prepared my dose of AstraZeneca, the nurse – who I know well – told me that there was still a problem locally with the vax-shy very old.

“Some don’t like vaccinations, some don’t like the Covid vaccines, especially if it’s AstraZeneca. But to be honest, many of them just can’t be bothered,” she said. “They live isolated in villages or hamlets which they think the virus will never reach.”

I live in just such a hamlet in the Norman hills – permanent population 7. Three of my neighbours are 80-plus. None have been vaccinated.

“Why bother?” they say “There hasn’t been a single case of Covid in our commune. Not this year, not last year.”

This, as far as I can establish, is true. But there have been many cases in the villages and towns down in the valley. My hamlet is, in effect, a cluster waiting to happen.

So much for anecdotes. Here are some facts.

France is not as vaccine-shy as we thought and the French themselves once had pollsters believe.

A survey suggested last year that under half of the French population – 49 percent – was prepared to accept an anti-Covid vaccination. By last month that had increased to 65 percent, still much lower than other countries.

There is, however, a big difference between what the French say they will do and what they actually do.

The French government’s vaccine drive is now approaching its target of 30 million first doses (nearly 60 percent of the adult population) by June 15th. As of Wednesday night, 29,056,963 people had received a first dose – 55.3 percent of adults. The 30 million target will be reached two or three days early, on Friday or Saturday.

There is no reason to believe the campaign is flagging. Appointments are being booked weeks in advance. Younger people have flocked to vaccinodromes, pharmacies and doctors’ and nurses’ surgeries since vaccination was opened to all over-18s last week.

There are still some experts who fear that the hard work is yet to be done: that it will be difficult to bring in enough of the vax-shy or the vax-lazy to reach the kind of vaccination levels needed for “herd immunity” from Covid-19.

What level is that? The experts keep moving the goalposts. Initially the figure was 70 percent, then 80 percent. Some now suggest that 90 percent coverage will be needed to subdue the more virulent variants of Covid now in circulation.

Can France hope to reach such high figures?

The coverage already achieved of older sections of the population suggests that well over 80 percent is feasible. Higher than that may be uncertain – but not just in France.

The wonderful Vaccintracker website gives the small print on vaccine coverage in France by tranches of age.

As of June 6th – last Sunday – French people aged between 75 and 79 were already 87.3 percent first-vaccinated. The figure for 70 to 74 year old was 85.4 percent. For 65 to 69s: 74.4 percent.

Significantly, the very old are LESS covered than the pretty old. “Only” 77.1 percent of those aged 80 or more had received one dose. This confirms my Norman anecdotes. Despite the almost 100 percent coverage achieved in care homes, there are a lot of very elderly people in France who don’t fancy, or can’t easily obtain, a vaccination.

The government says that it is working on the problem.

They are, in theory, contacting old people individually and urging and helping them to find an appointment. The Vaccintracker figures on age-coverage show an increase day by day in the first-vaccination level of all groups, including the over 80s.

There is no reason to believe that younger French people – whatever they might tell pollsters – will finally prove to be more vax-resistant than the old.

There is certainly a hard core of people in France who refuse all vaxes on health or ideological grounds.  A great many others who professed to be anti-vax are now falling into line, probably to simplify their own lives rather than because they accepted that vaccination is in the common good.

On present trends France will have vaccinated 40 million people by mid-July – almost 80 percent of adults. I expect that the vaccine drive will run into the sand and mud of the vax-resistant beyond that point but should, judging by the figures achieved for septuagenarians like me, struggle on into percentages in the mid-to-high 80s.

Will that be enough? We had better hope so.

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Why Germans’ famed efficiency makes the country less efficient

Germans are famous for their love of efficiency - and impatience that comes with it. But this desire for getting things done as quickly as possible can backfire, whether at the supermarket or in national politics, writes Brian Melican.

Published: 24 May 2023 10:38 CEST
OPINION: Why Germans' famed efficiency makes the country less efficient

A story about a new wave of “check-outs for chatting” caught my eye recently. In a country whose no-nonsense, “Move it or lose it, lady!” approach to supermarket till-staffing can reduce the uninitiated to tears, the idea of introducing a slow lane with a cashier who won’t sigh aggressively or bark at you for trying to strike up conversation is somewhere between quietly subversive and positively revolutionary – and got me thinking.

Why is it that German supermarket check-outs are so hectic in the first place?

READ ALSO: German supermarkets fight loneliness with slower check outs for chatting

If you talk to people here about it – other Germans, long-term foreign residents, and keen observers on shorter visits – you’ll hear a few theories.

One is that Germans tend to shop daily on the way home from work, and so place a higher premium on brisk service than countries where a weekly shop is more common; and it is indeed a well-researched fact that German supermarket shopping patterns are higher-frequency than in many comparable countries.

Bavarian supermarket

A sign at a now-famous supermarket in Bavaria advertises a special counter saying “Here you can have a chat”. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Karl-Josef Hildenbrand

Another theory is that, in many parts of the country (such as Bavaria), supermarket opening hours are so short that there is no other way for everyone to get their shopping done than to keep things ticking along at a good old clip.

The most simple (and immediately plausible) explanation, of course, is that supermarkets like to keep both staffing and queuing to a minimum: short-staffing means lower costs, while shorter queues make for fewer abandoned trolleys.

German love of efficiency

Those in the know say that most store chains do indeed set average numbers of articles per minute which their cashiers are required to scan – and that this number is higher at certain discounters notorious for their hard-nosed attitude.

Beyond businesses’ penny-pinching, fast-lane tills are a demonstration of the broader German love of efficiency: after all, customers wouldn’t put up with being given the bum’s rush if there weren’t a cultural premium placed on smooth and speedy operations.

Then again, as many observers not yet blind to the oddness of Germany’s daily ‘Supermarket Sweep’ immediately notice, the race to get purchases over the till at the highest possible rate is wholly counter-productive: once scanned, the items pile up faster than even the best-organised couple can stow away, leaving an embarrassing, sweat-inducing lull – and then, while people in the queue roll their eyes and huff, a race to pay (usually in cash, natch’).

In a way, it’s similar to Germany’s famed autobahns, on which there is theoretically no speed limit and on which some drivers do indeed race ahead – into traffic jams often caused by excessive velocity.

Yes, it is a classic case of more haste, less speed. We think we’re doing something faster, but actually our impatience is proving counterproductive.

German impatience

This is, in my view, the crux of the issue: Germans are a hasty bunch. Indeed, research shows that we have less patience than comparable European populations – especially in retail situations. Yes, impatience is one of our defining national characteristics – and, as I pointed out during last summer’s rail meltdown, it is one of our enduring national tragedies that we are at once impatient and badly organised.

As well as at the tills and on the roads, you can observe German impatience in any queue (which we try to jump) and generally any other situation in which we are expected to wait.

Think back to early 2021, for instance, when the three-month UK-EU vaccine gap caused something approaching a national breakdown here, and the Health Minister was pressured into buying extra doses outside of the European framework.

This infuriated our neighbours and deprived developing countries of much-needed jabs – which, predictably, ended up arriving after the scheduled ones, leaving us with a glut of vaccines which, that very autumn, had to be destroyed.

A health worker prepares a syringe with the Comirnaty Covid-19 vaccine by Biontech-Pfizer. Photo: John MACDOUGALL / AFP

Now, you can see the same phenomenon with heating legislation: frustrated by the slow pace of change, Minister for Energy and the Economy Robert Habeck intended to force property owners to switch their heating systems to low-carbon alternatives within the next few years.

The fact that the supply of said alternatives is nowhere near sufficient – and that there are too few heating engineers to fit them – got lost in the haste…

The positive side of impatience

This example does, however, reveal one strongly positive side of our national impatience: if well- directed, it can create a sense of urgency about tackling thorny issues. Habeck is wrong to force the switch on an arbitrary timescale – but he is right to try and get things moving.

In most advanced economies, buildings are responsible for anything up to 40 percent of carbon emissions and, while major industrials have actually been cutting their CO2 output for decades now, the built environment has hardly seen any real improvements.

Ideally, a sensible compromise will be reached which sets out an ambitious direction of travel – and gets companies to start expanding capacity accordingly, upping output and increasing the number of systems which can be replaced later down the line. Less haste now, more speed later.

The same is true of our defence policy, which – after several directionless decades – is now being remodelled with impressive single-mindedness by a visibly impatient Boris Pistorius.

As for the check-outs for chatting, I’m not sure they’ll catch on. However counterproductive speed at the till may be, I just don’t see a large number of us being happy to sacrifice the illusion of rapidity so that a lonely old biddy can have a chinwag. Not that we are the heartless automatons that makes us sound like: Germany is actually a very chatty country.

It’s just that there’s a time and a place for it: at the weekly farmer’s markets, for instance, or at the bus stop. The latter is the ideal place to get Germans talking, by the way: just start with “About bloody time the bus got here, eh?” So langsam könnte der Bus ja kommen, wie ich finde…

READ ALSO: 7 places where you can actually make small talk with Germans

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