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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Macron is now coercing the French into getting vaccinated – and it seems that they like it

Previously reliant on people volunteering to be vaccinated, the French government has now introduced two measures that are more coercive - compulsory vaccines for health workers and restricted access to everyday venues like cafés for the non-vaccinated. John Lichfield examines how this announcement has gone down.

OPINION: Macron is now coercing the French into getting vaccinated - and it seems that they like it
The extension of the health passport will make daily life more difficult for the unvaccinated. Photo: Sameer Al Doumy/AFP

Now we know. The French never like being told what to do but they do, if politely threatened, do what they are told.

They may even prefer it that way. It reminds them of their school days. 

Well over one million French people made appointments for a first vaccination in the hours following President Emmanuel Macron’s televised address to the nation last night.

Macron said he was not going to make vaccination compulsory (yet) except for those in the health and caring professions. But he made it clear that “normal life” after August 1st would be complicated, even unpleasant, for those who were not vaccinated.

No going to the café, eating in restaurants, no cinema, no theatres, no visiting relatives in hospital, no travelling long distance by train or bus unless you had a “health pass”. To have any fun you will have to be vaccinated; or have constant Covid tests; or have documentary proof that you have recovered from the virus.

READ ALSO How France’s expanded health passport will work

And from October repeated “social” tests for Covid will not be paid for by the French health system. In other words you might have to pay €30 or so every few days to carry on going to the café unvaccinated.

Macron’s sensible announcements had two obvious causes.

First, the Delta variant of Covid threatens to produce a fourth wave of the pandemic in France this summer or early autumn. Cases are now running at around 4,000  a day, up by 64 percent in a week.

There are likely to be 20 to 30 thousand cases a day again by late August if France follows the UK pattern. Vaccination  means that there will not be the same number of acute cases and deaths as in wave one to three. But occupation of acute beds IS beginning to climb in Britain; and Britain is much more vaccinated than France.

READ ALSO Can tourists use France’s health passport o access museums, trains and cafés 

Secondly, the rate of vaccination of the French population – especially younger people – has fallen off a cliff since the record days of May. From 400,000 a day, the first-jabbing rate has fallen to around 170,000 a day.

Several explanations are offered for this slowing in demand. After the first rush, France has run into the layers of the vax-reluctant, vax-lax, vax-shy and a hard-core of vax-resisters. Nothing much can be done about that last category but their numbers are not so great as polls last year had us believe.

Older age groups in France are now pretty thoroughly vaccinated (over-80’s are more than 80 percent first jabbed; 75-79’s 90 percent and so on). These figures still need to be higher but the real problem is the unvaccinated young who are by far the biggest proportion of those catching and passing on the new, more contagious Covid variant.

As of a couple of days ago only 46.5 percent of  25-29 years old in France were first vaccinated and only 25.4 fully covered. It was the other unvaxxed 54.5 percent that Macron’s big stick was aimed.

It was they, overwhelmingly, who responded by making appointments on the Doctolib and other booking sites last night and earlier today – over 1.3 m bookings by Tuesday lunchtime.

Macron said that compulsory vaccination of the entire population had not been ruled out…for the time being. He said that he “trusted” the French to do the right thing (with a couple of swipes from his big stick to encourage them).

Compulsion has been introduced, however, for the caring and health professions and other workers, like firefighters, who are in direct contact with the Covid-vulnerable. Why this should be necessary defeats me.

The figures are sketchy but it seems that a high proportion of French doctors are vaccinated (by no means all) but the percentage falls sharply for other health workers such as nurses. Only an estimated 60 percent of staff in care home for the elderly are first-vaccinated.

Why? I put this question to a couple of experts some time ago. They said, in effect, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. People in the medium to lower ranks of the health profession have enough scientific knowledge to be taken in by some of the pseudo-scientific anti-vax nonsense on the internet. They don’t have the knowledge to see through it.

In any case, from September 15th they risk being suspended and eventually fired if they do not get vaccinated.

Macron, it seems to me, got the contents and tone of last night’s statement about right.

Questions should be asked all the same about the government’s vaccine strategy. It improved enormously in March to May after a slow start. By my calculations, something like 68 percent of French adults have now been first-vaccinated (plus 800,000 of 12-17 year olds). Adults are around 53 percent fully covered.

But the government took its foot off the pedal last month (even with the Delta variant already threatening). It accepted that French people were not likely to be vaccinated in great numbers in late July and August when the country pauses for its holidays, pandemic or not.

The target of 40 million first vaccinations, originally set for July 15th, was put back to the end of August.

It is this blunder, as well as the vax-laziness or vax-resistance of the young, which obliged Macron to get out the big stick last night.

Member comments

  1. This is a very establishment view of what is going on. Macron is not “sensible” to bully people to take an experimental vaccine. He is asking for trouble and the size of the hostile demonstrations indicates that he has successfully reignited the Yellow vests plus plus.
    Further, as in the UK, it is scandalous to force vaccines on young people who are at little risk especially as there perfectly satisfactory safe cheap medicines like Ivermectin.
    The French government and its medical hacks have said everything and its opposite during this pandemic and are in for a rough ride up to the presidential election.

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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.

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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