“The virus is accelerating, we are also accelerating”. The government seems to have started a race against time, which continues to focus on encouraging vaccination and recall rather than taking restrictive measures. This is why government spokesman Gabriel Attal announced on Tuesday an advance in the schedule for the implementation of the vaccine pass.
The project was initially to be presented to the Council of Ministers on January 5 for adoption by Parliament by the end of the first month of 2022.
Gabriel Attal thus announced, after a meeting with associations of representatives of local elected officials, that an extraordinary Council of Ministers had been convened on Monday, December 27 in order to present the bill. This will therefore be examined by Parliament immediately so that the text is finally adopted for the “first half of January”. A schedule confirmed by the Prime Minister during his consultation with the group presidents in Parliament.
“We don’t have a second to lose, the sooner we have the vaccination pass, the better we will be protected”, assured Gabriel Attal. He also reported on health forecasts “disturbing” concerning the epidemic situation in France, with in particular an Omicron variant which spreads very quickly and a hospital situation “tense”.
According to a source in the executive entourage, this change in tone and strategy is linked to the spread of Omicron at breakneck speed. “We cannot afford to waste time on the pretext of vacation”, this source tells us. “This acceleration is constrained by the force of the wave”, she says.
“This weekend, we estimated that 10% of the contaminations detected in our country were linked to the Omicron variant. We are probably beyond today and we are far beyond in certain regions, in particular in Île-de-France”, specifies the spokesperson. In Paris in particular, more than one in three contamination is linked to the new variant, which is more contagious, but which does not seem to withstand the booster doses of the Covid vaccines.