Listening to the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, who says he wants to “piss off” the unvaccinated, we understand that for him, the time for education is over. That he is convinced, finally, that after a little over a year of vaccination, the reluctant French will no longer change their minds.
franceinfo: Jean Viard, the French who do not want to be vaccinated, will no longer change their minds, according to you?
Jean Viard: But the unvaccinated are not homogeneous. Out of the 5 million, there are isolated people, very poor people, people who are not aware of what is going on. I do not know how many, but for example, I believe that there are 600,000 over 80 years, one can think that there are many who never leave their homes. They don’t see anyone, they think to themselves why I should get vaccinated, I don’t leave my house.
There is a whole culture, I would say neo baba, that is to say geographically where we came after 68. So there is a tradition of refusing medicine with alternative medicine. So here, we have a relation to health, to the body, we heal ourselves with plants, etc.
There is a whole neo-religious movement, basically saying: I decide when I die, and we can see how marriage for all or other fairly radical movements, there have an anti-vaccine thought. So there is all of that. And there is obviously a point among the National Front activists and a point among the LFI of anti-macronians who do not want because it is Macron’s vaccine. And I, in my team, I have an employee who tells me: I am waiting for the French vaccine …
There are also those who are also afraid of the vaccine, of new technologies, of messenger RNA, who say that we lack perspective? Do we often hear that too?
Yes, of course, and there, we do not have a long-term decline, we have a mass phenomenon, we have vaccinated 3 billion people, it is still a very good sample. But it is true that we have no lasting effect, even if we kill ourselves to explain that the interest of messenger RNA is that after 2 days, it has disappeared. . I am not going to play doctor, but I believe that there are all these populations and basically what the government’s objective is to try to treat them differently from each other. We will judge at the end: whether the brutal intervention of the president means that there are a million more vaccinated. He was right, otherwise he was wrong. Me, I would tend to say like that.
It is at least as much, if not more, the draft vaccine pass than the words of the president, one imagines, which involves these first vaccinations since, you said it yesterday, it will be very complicated to live normally without vaccine from now on.
Jean Viard, the President of the Republic, said out loud what many French people think softly. This is what several members of the government hammered home to defend Emmanuel Macron in the face of the controversy he sparked. Do you think this is fair or is it still very hypothetical?
What is belonging to a city, what is it about sharing values? What if you want to be in solidarity with each other, what is it to protect the weak who miss a step? What is it to save the person who falls into the water? It is all the same a whole essential question: it is what one has in common in a community, and basically, is citizenship, that is to say belonging to the city; normally, there are common values in the city, and then, behind the ramparts, there are the barbarians, if I can schematize. When the barbarians enter the city, how do you deal with the issue?
There, you speak of another formula of Emmanuel Macron that an irresponsible is no longer a citizen and responsible. It designates the unvaccinated. And there may be a paradox there. This is because we hear the oppositions say there is once again the deprivation of nationality, the deprivation of citizenship. But for a choice that remains allowed by French law, we have the right, it is completely legal not to be vaccinated. We don’t have to, we don’t deviate from any rule. Isn’t there a paradox there anyway?
When François Hollande proposed the forfeiture of nationality after the attacks, 86% of French people agreed with him in public opinion. The idea, basically, that those who turn against the community may possibly be excluded if they have an alternative.
But here, we are talking about French who do not betray any rule and who respect all the laws, which was not the case with debates on forfeiture of nationality. We were talking about terrorists in particular. There, it has absolutely no relation. So we can say that there is a gap between very strong words, a kind of threat of second-class citizens, while they respect the laws of the Republic?
I am not here to judge. I try to analyze the operations and I think the idea is to try to shake the coconut tree in all directions. And each time, we shake it in one direction, we hope to recover a few hundred thousand vaccinated. That’s a bit of the game. Each time, we can cause great scandals, etc. as always, it is gauged at the end, depending on the result we will have. And it’s very difficult because today, there are a lot of people who believe in it and on this issue we should be in the know.