France has “never known such a situation”, “there are everywhere”, it is a “tidal wave”, launched Olivier Véran at the opening of these urgent discussions on this text presented on Monday in Council of Ministers.
A room of the National Assembly well supplied for a December 29, deputies also in video, facing a minister who coughs but ensures that he is “not sick”: the bill on the vaccine pass has resulted in a strong mobilization in an unprecedented context. France has “never known such a situation”, “there are everywhere”, it is a “tidal wave”, launches Olivier Véran at the opening of these urgent discussions on this text presented Monday in Council ministers.
Over the past 24 hours, 208,000 cases have been recorded, a record shattered. “Every second, more than two French people are diagnosed positive”, “more than a million French people are currently positive for the coronavirus”, insisted the Minister of Health in a serious voice in front of the parliamentarians crowded in a room of a hundred seats in the Palais Bourbon. The bill must be considered in session in the Assembly on Monday, and two days later in the Senate. The challenge is for Parliament to adopt it in less than ten days, with a view to the entry into force of the vaccination pass from January 15.
Despite the holiday season and the current parliamentary recess, all the political groups have sent deputies to the Laws Committee, for this – already – twelfth text on the management of the health crisis. “Nobody imagined that we would need a new text, but here it is, it is the history of these last two years”, slips to AFP a deputy of the majority coming from the south of France.
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We will not oppose the vaccination pass
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The patroness of LFI deputies Mathilde Panot is indignant at being “summoned between the Yule log and the New Year’s greetings to endorse in record time” this government project. And the “examination conditions”, in “an undersized room, without possible physical distancing, CO2 sensors and air purifiers, are to illustrate, Blanquer style, how an Omicron ‘cluster’ can be formed”, asks his rebellious colleague Danièle Obono on Twitter.
It is that we hear coughs, including on the side of the Minister of Health who must stop to drink. “I’m not sick, I just have a dry throat,” he told his neighbor, commission president Yaël Braun-Pivet (LREM) who is leading the discussions. More than 250 amendments have been tabled for this single meeting, which promises to last late into the evening, before a probably long night on Monday in the hemicycle. The “irreducible” to the vaccine, identity checks of pass holders, the problem of 12-17 year olds, and even political meetings are among the questions raised.
“We will not oppose the vaccination pass” even if “the temptation is great to transform this vote into a referendum” on the management of the crisis, launches Ian Boucard for the LR, to the relief of the majority. The most virulent comments come from the left of the left. The text creates “two categories of citizens” and “down with the unvaccinated”, criticizes the rebellious Mathilde Panot. Communist Sébastien Jumel calls the executive “authoritarian”.
“Threats” and “intimidation”
Olivier Véran rejects these “lawsuits in denial of democracy” or on a “closure of the country”: “when we compare ourselves, we console ourselves”, he replies, listing the measures taken by neighboring states. In a sometimes heavy atmosphere, the committee chairperson made a preliminary update. “You have all received emails, threatening letters: if you do not vote no (to the bill) all of France will remember the National Assembly as a gigantic bloodbath”, she quotes, hammering that “these intimidations have no place in our Republic”.
During the night, the personal garage of LREM deputy for Oise Pascal Bois was damaged by fire. And again in the morning, the deputy president of the LREM group Aurore Bergé told France 2 how she was “fed up with being called a Nazi or a collaborator” by the anti-vax, declaring to file a complaint against the professor of philosophy René Chiche who compared the vaccination pass to the Jewish status of 1940.
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