“Freedom”, “No to the vaccine”… The demonstrations of the anti-sanitary pass and “antivax” gathered 54,000 participants throughout France, according to the Ministry of the Interior, almost twice as many as last week (105,200), which had been marked by a very clear rebound in mobilization.
In Paris, four processions mobilized 7,000 people and four people were arrested, according to the ministry. Some 5,800 notably participated in the rally organized by the Patriotes of Florian Philippot, which set off around 3 p.m. from Trocadero, while demonstrations of “yellow vests” were taking place elsewhere in the capital. The speakers at the podium made the crowd chant “Freedom Djokovic”in Serbian: encouragement for the tennis champion that the Australian government does not want to let enter its soil for the Australian Open because he is not vaccinated.
A team from Agence France-Presse was threatened with death and assaulted and one of the security guards protecting it injured in the head, after the departure of the procession at the level of the Palais de Tokyo. About 150 individuals, identified as far-right by journalists, arrived near the team. At the call of a hooded individual, at least fifty people went to the videographer to do battle with her. The protection officers intervened before being beaten, in particular with truncheons, so that they were protecting the videographer. Lone of the security guards was hit in the head with a bottle, splitting his scalp.
In the rest of the country, 47,000 demonstrators and six arrests were recorded. The demonstrators were 1,300 in Lyon, 1,140 in Nantes, 1,000 in Bordeaux, 950 in Rennes, 750 in Marseille, 650 in Clermont-Ferrand, according to the police or the prefectures. For all these demonstrators, the challenge was to do at least as well as the previous Saturday. In the wake of the declarations of Emmanuel Macron, decided to “annoy” the non-vaccinated, 105,200 demonstrators had then been counted by the Ministry of the Interior throughout France, four times more than the 25,500 of the previous mobilization on December 18.
A few hours before these demonstrations, the deputies adopted in the night the controversial bill transforming the health pass into a vaccination pass at second reading. The debates resumed in the Senate, before a final vote of the National Assembly on Sunday afternoon.
>> Vaccine pass: here are the four major changes made by the Senate to the bill
The pass is present on a third front this weekend: for lack of an anti-Covid reminder, tens of thousands of health passes were to be deactivated on Saturday, deadline set in November. From now on, you must have done your booster at the latest seven months after the previous injection, otherwise the pass is deactivated. This period will even be reduced to four months on February 15. In theory, some 560,000 people were likely to lose their passes on Saturday, according to the Department of Health. But the real figure is difficult to determine, in particular because we cannot distinguish people who have been infected without notifying it in the TousAntiCovid application, which extends the validity of their pass.