“The text that we are going to examine is a text of cold blood.” It is with these words that the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, opened the debates in the National Assembly on the bill transforming the health pass into a vaccination pass on Monday, January 3. Contested by several opposition groups, the bill is the subject of more than 650 amendments. However, it should be definitively adopted by Parliament by the weekend, for entry into force on January 15.
The vaccine, the only sesame for leisure activities
The government intends to put even more pressure on nearly five million French people aged 12 and over unvaccinated. With this reform, a negative test will no longer suffice to access leisure activities, go to restaurants, bars, fairs or interregional public transport. It will now be necessary to have a complete vaccination schedule. Only health establishments and services will be subject to an exception.
To have a complete vaccination schedule, it will be necessary, from February 15, to carry out its booster dose four months – and no longer up to seven months – after its second dose, knowing that an infection is always equivalent to an injection. .
The bill also provides for a tougher sanctions. Holding a false pass will be punishable by five years’ imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros. Presenting a pass belonging to someone else or transmitting a pass to someone else with a view to its fraudulent use will be punished by a fixed fine of 1,000 euros, compared to 135 euros today.
Several elected officials fought unsuccessfully to exempt minors from 12 to 17 years of age from vaccination passes. If it will not be necessary to go to work, the government proposes to impose an administrative fine on companies that do not play the telecommuting game.
An “ineffective” and liberticidal pass for the opposition
According to the LREM president of the Law Commission, Yaël Braun-Pivet, this law will allow “to avoid much more coercive measures “, such as confinements or curfews.
An opinion that the opposition does not share. If the PS group announced that it would vote “in principle” for the vaccination pass, like the majority of LR deputies, the Insoumis, through the voice of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, defended in vain a motion to reject prior against a pass they judge “100% ineffective“in view of the current spread of the virus. The checks that may be carried out by the managers of the places and activities subject to the pass pave the way for a “totalitarian society”, also denounced the presidential candidate.
“You have sown indescribable chaos because of your carelessness”, launched the deputy La France insoumise des Bouches-du-Rhône for the government. Since the start of the health crisis, “you got everything wrong, the tests, the gauges, the masks, the vaccines, the waves “, also denounced Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “Finally, at the edge of the abyss, you have only one watchword, let’s take a big step “, he added.
“In the past you were so wrong that it is difficult today to pay the same attention to yourself when expressing yourself”, Olivier Véran replied, for whom “to err is human, to persevere is evil. “” You mentioned this Pfizer ‘thing’ that you would never, ever receive. I believe you have received your third dose of Pfizer, Mr. he said in particular. “You claim to be one day President of the Republic, you are taking an example from two very bad presidents, the only ones who have refused any restriction, any health management measure since the start of the pandemic, they are called Mr. Bolsonaro in Brazil and Mr. Trump in the United States “, he said.
Communist presidential candidate Fabien Roussel called for patenting of vaccines: “The WHO reminds us, it is not with booster doses that we will be able to eradicate the appearance of the variant, but it is by allowing all the peoples of the world to be vaccinated quickly”.
As for the spokesperson of the deputies RN Sébastien Chenu, he indicated to prefer “target people at risk and not force all French people “.
Within the majority itself, some elected LREM also expressed their reservations, like Marie-Ange Magne, Member of Parliament for Haute-Vienne, who deplores that “the exceptional is becoming the norm today”. “I pointed to a risk last fall habituation to the restriction of our freedoms, I think we are there “, she defended on France Bleu Limousin.
Elected officials threatened with death
The project divides and crystallizes the anger against the elected representatives of the majority: several indicated to have been threatened. The deputy president of the LREM group Aurore Bergé, who will file a complaint for a tweet in which she is compared to women shorn for collaboration after the Second World War, denounced in the JDD these intimidations which are aimed, according to her, “that parliamentarians no longer feel free to vote in their soul and conscience “.
“I mean here my unwavering support for elected officials, you who today suffer from intimidation, insults, threats, attacks, acts of vandalism, this is completely unacceptable”, added the Minister of Health from the platform of the National Assembly. “If we are sometimes powerless in the face of certain errors, we will not remain so not helpless in the face of violence “, he added.
By Tuesday, the French will be “53 million to have received a first injection “, underlined Olivier Véran. “The choice of science, the choice of knowledge, the choice of responsibility, it’s always the right choice “, he insisted, deploring that “the refusal of vaccination carries many of the sad passions of which our society is capable. self”, he also tackled.