Towards a postponement of the start of the new school year? For Jean-Michel Blanquer, it’s no

Invited this Wednesday on LCI, the Minister of Education dismissed with a wave of his hand the idea of ​​postponing the date of the start of the school year in January, as requested by some opposition politicians. “It’s the opposite of common sense”, according to Jean-Michel Blanquer, for whom the systematic use of class closures “is not the solution”. He pointed out a tendency to “to confuse the school and the nursery”, regarding the risk of contamination. At school, “children have social interactions, just like their parents”, he developed, “but since the start of the crisis, there is no more school cluster than in the rest of society”.

The closure of classes or the postponement of the start of the school year should be considered “last resort”, according to the minister, who promises that the situation will be reassessed as the epidemic progresses.

“I have an eleven year old daughter myself, she will be vaccinated and that is a good thing.” The Minister of Education affirms that the 20 to 30% of parents who have already decided to have their children vaccinated will soon be more numerous. “We think this is a figure that will go up, just as the 12-17 year old figure has gradually risen from the end of July.”. For him, “it’s normal for parents to ask questions, it seems to me to be completely justified”, while 68% of them are for the moment rather hostile to the idea of ​​having their children vaccinated against Covid-19.

Jean-Michel Blanquer recalled that France had taken its time, and only arrived at the opening of the vaccination of under twelve years after several countries. According to him, this decline allowed the emergence of a “series of studies, which now show that vaccination of children is safe”.

The battle of opinion is “neither won nor lost”, according to the Minister of Education, “she didn’t start”. The counter-intuitive paradox that the government will have to resolve stems from the imbalance between the “individual benefit” (for children who rarely develop severe forms of the disease), and “collective benefit” (to improve immunization of the general population). This is undoubtedly why Jean-Michel Blanquer made a point of recalling both that children risked, “even if it is a very small number”, hospitalization, and that“there are other diseases for which we vaccinate with the same type of individual probability”.