What end date for the vaccination pass, which must come into force in mid-January? As it stands, the bill debated in Parliament for two weeks and until Wednesday in the Senate in order to transform the health pass into a vaccination pass, does not say so.
In principle, the legal framework for a state of health emergency must end on July 31, 2022 and therefore take with it all the health restriction measures established to fight the pandemic since March 2020. The President of the Republic will then return elected in April, his government and his majority to decide on his continuation or not. “All these health pass and vaccine pass tools, the day we will no longer need them, the day we are no longer under the permanent threat of a new variant, we will do without them with a lot of pleasure and even a lot of joy ”, hammered Monday in front of the senators, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran.
In the National Assembly as in the Senate, the debates are even more lively on this subject three months before the presidential election, while the anti-pass and anti-vaccine demonstrations are resuming all over France, after the controversial remarks of the head of the state on the unvaccinated. “The vaccination pass is not our social project. (…) I got involved with Emmanuel Macron precisely because I care about collective freedoms and the vaccination pass is indeed not consistent with this project, but it is consistent with the fight against the epidemic “, defended the government spokesman, Gabriel Attal, Tuesday on Europe 1.
Epidemic criteria
This lack of perspective on the duration of the vaccination pass on the part of the executive raises a series of questions raised in the parliamentary debate. First, the modalities of parliamentary control over the prerogatives granted to the executive. “We will have a solid and demanding majority on a certain number of conditions: the limitation in time [du passe vaccinal], and the control, always, of the Parliament ”, Gérard Larcher, President of the Senate, warned on France Inter on Tuesday. Elected officials from all groups questioned the effectiveness of the health and vaccination pass in the face of the spread of the Omicron variant, starting with the rapporteur Philippe Bas (Les Républicains, Manche), stressing “Disorder at school, at work and above all at the hospital, for which the government has not prepared the country”.
Mr. Bas voted, Monday in committee and then Tuesday in session, an amendment which provides “The extinction of the vaccination pass” or its activation according to epidemic criteria, in particular the number of hospitalizations of Covid patients below the 10,000 national level and an incidence rate whose limit would be specified by decree. The pass, territorialized, would be maintained in the departments where the vaccination rate is less than 80%. The senators had also amended the text with similar criteria, in July 2021, for the establishment of the health pass in certain places of daily life and leisure activities. “The maintenance of this pass will not be left to the discretion of the current government and those who will follow it”, Philippe Bas insisted on Tuesday during the general discussion.
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