The French Parliament gave final approval on Sunday (16) to the latest measures by the government of Emmanuel Macron to fight Covid-19, which include a vaccination pass contested by protesters against immunizations.
Lawmakers in the National Assembly (lower house) approved the package by 215 in favor and 58 votes against, thus ensuring that the rules take effect in the coming days.
The measures – which did not have an easy path in Parliament, with opponents evaluating some of them as too harsh – require the vaccination certificate to attend places such as restaurants, cafes, cinemas and long-distance trains, overturning the possibility of presenting a negative test. .
The text had been approved in the Assembly at the beginning of the month with 214 votes in favour, 93 against and 27 abstentions. Then it went to the Senate, where it underwent changes and ended up going through 187 to 66, with 88 abstentions. Due to the changes, it had to undergo a new review in the lower house, which delayed its implementation.
Currently, 78% of the population has a complete vaccination schedule, according to data from the Ministry of Health released this Saturday (15).
Macron, who is due to run for a second term in April’s presidential election, told Le Parisien newspaper this month that he wanted to piss off the unvaccinated by making their lives so complicated that they would end up immunizing themselves against Covid.
Thousands of anti-vaccine protesters took to the streets of Paris and other French cities to protest the law, but the group was smaller than seen the week before, shortly after Macron’s statement.
France is in the midst of its fifth wave of Covid-19, with daily cases often hitting record highs above 300,000. Still, the number of more serious infections, which bring patients to ICU wards, is much lower than what was seen in the first wave, in March and April 2020.
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