I.In France, all 11 children now need to be vaccinated. If parents want their children to go to school, or take part in many extra-curricular activities, they have to accept it. No selection or mitigation of vaccine doubts will occur.
On Monday the French government and health authorities are accelerating the country’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign – a process complicated by widespread suspicions about inoculation that has undermined the conventional global conspiracy theories.
For weeks, censuses have said that up to 60% of the French population do not want to be vaccinated. As government vaccination activity enters its third week, official figures show that at least 93,000 people were given the injection – a much lower number than elsewhere in Europe, which including the UK, Germany and Italy.
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Laurent-Henri Vignaud, a science historian whose 2019 book Antivax, co-authored by immunologist Françoise Salvadori, examines vaccine suspicion in the west from the 18th century, says we should not ignore it. polls suggesting French rejection of the vaccine.
“There is a big difference between what the French say and what they do,” he told the Guardian. “And potentially abstract polls do not reveal what happens when people know where to get the vaccine, what to do, how, when and why.”
Vaccination suspicions have been around for as long as vaccines, but for years censuses have said that most of its European neighbors in France have more – a strange reputation given that the pioneer of immunology Louis Pasteur French and is a wild national pride.
Professor Jocelyn Raude, an expert on health behavior at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Santé Publique who studied the anti-vaccination movement, says opinion polls have shown 90% support for vaccines so far to 2005, “which looks amazing today”.
However, by the beginning of the 21st century the seeds of doubt had already been sown.
In the 1990s, a major campaign to vaccinate French children against hepatitis B coincided with a leap in several cases of sclerosis, although studies have never found a definite link between the two.
In 1991, there was a medical scandal not related to vaccines specifically when it was discovered that health authorities had provided information about HIV – contaminated blood products to hemophiliacs in the 1980s. Several ministers have been charged with murder.
However, Raude said it was a 2009 H1N1 scandal, in which the government grossly exceeded 94m vaccine doses at a cost of € 869m (£ 780m), which sparked vaccine suspicion today.
The health ministry subsequently stopped more than half of the order but the damage was done. Opposition parties have criticized the waste of public money and accused officials of being in a league with big pharma. In the end, 323 people in France died of H1N1, only 6m people were vaccinated and 19m vaccine doses were destroyed. The official estimate put the cost of the debate at € 382m.
Raude says the suspicion was heightened when some French celebrities started voicing vaccine suspicions, redistributed by emerging social media networks.
Then came the Mediator scandal. The diabetic drug, which was widely prescribed but wrongly for those trying to lose weight, was linked to between 500 and 1,200 deaths over more than three decades.
The mediator’s maker, Servier, was charged with charges of manslaughter, and 12 people ended up in the dock in a criminal lawsuit last year, including officers who were also paid as consultants of pharmaceutical companies. The company and the accused are in denial. Judgment is expected in March.
“It was a stressful point. The Mediator’s scandal slammed into people’s minds the idea of corruption between officials and pharmaceutical companies in France; it was about business not health safety, ”says Raude.
Another reason, he says, is the lack of confidence in doctors and scientists.
“It is not new for the French to lack confidence in political leaders, but there is a low level of confidence in the French medical authorities. The consequence of this is that if you do not trust the experts, you will not follow their advice. ”
Vignaud says there is less suspicion of vaccines against the vaccine itself than those who promote it, showing a lack of trust of “politicians, high-profile doctors and experts and journalists”.
“France does not have stronger and faster anti-vaxxers than anywhere else, what it has is … a particular dissatisfaction with the political class,” he says.
“The state has strong expectations, but we are permanently disappointed: we can see this through the vaccination program: some say it is too slow, others it is too fast. Everyone is disappointed. ”
The film Hold-Up, a hugely lampooned and debunked epic claims that Covid-19 is a global conspiracy, has contributed to the malice and has been shared by influential figures.
Among those trying to tackle the disillusionment with facts and humor is the Facebook site Les Vaxxeuses. “Vaccines are the greatest medical advances… don’t let lies make you doubt the benefits,” the website says.
Ministers are confident that France’s vaccination program will come up in the coming weeks, calling it a “marathon, not a sprint”.
“As soon as the vaccine is made, people get the vaccine. They’ve had enough, ”says Vignaud.
Raude agrees that the government’s “slow measures” strategy appears to be working. “The government has been slow and careful not to intimidate people daoine when the French see the benefits, they will.”