Le Pass Sanitaire

 Once you have been vaccinated twice with the appointed vaccine - AstraZeneca for certain people, for other Pfizer - you get a document with two QR codes that you can scan into your Tous Anti Covid application. This then becomes your European Covid Passport, also known in France as your pass sanitaire.

A pass sanitaire can also be obtained by getting a recent PCR test. This must be a temporary thing, I imagine, because the validity of the test expires.

French people are quite reluctant to be vaccinated. They have a very high degree of respect for science, but much less for scientists. There is also much more evidence of occult healing, clairvoyance and so on than you typically get in the UK.

So on Monday when M Macron announced that the pass sanitaire would be needed to attend concerts, cinemas and the like, and to take trains, aeroplanes or long-distance bus services the cat was put among the pigeons.

The first effect was that hundreds of thousands of people booked appointments to be vaccinated. Almost one million on Monday evening. 4 million this week.

A secondary effect has been a great outpouring of wrath at the assault on individual freedom. "Bienvenue à la dictature sanitaire !" Welcome to the health dictatorship. Thousands of people have marched against the pass sanitaire.

Meanwhile, for our part, we are coming to terms with not visiting our son in the UK this summer. The UK has imposed a ten day quarantine as well as expensive PCR tests for travellers from France, even the fully vaccinated. This is because of the prevalence of the beta variant in those parts of France that are to be found in the Indian Ocean - Reunion and Mayotte. Here in mainland France we now are dominated by the delta variant which ironically probably arrived here from India via the UK.

Oh well. We remind ourselves of all those summers we spent in the UK wishing that we could explore France more. We'll head for the mountains and the mediterranean.


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