Discontent mounts but the vaccine is there to save lives – Liberation

And on its fifth return, the virus becomes rampant. Even before the expected outbreak around New Year’s Day, the country is facing new epidemic records, like this figure, simple and chilling at the same time: on Christmas Day, more than 100,000 new cases of contamination were recorded in France. This variant was initially to be called “naked”, but the WHO preferred to jump directly to the Greek letter “omicron”, worried about the homophony with the French word as with the English adjective. new. It is undoubtedly a shame as this variant reshuffles all the health maps and lays bare all our strategies. He is forcing the government to meet on Monday, in the midst of a truce for confectioners, and to consider its response options, none of which is encouraging.

Extend school holidays? Make telework compulsory? Introduce a curfew, if only on the night of December 31, and thus risk gatherings in private, crowded and poorly ventilated apartments? One of the measures is already known, the introduction of a “vaccine pass” which would de facto prohibit access to leisure activities, transport, bars and restaurants to all those who do not have a complete vaccination schedule. Discontent is mounting everywhere, as our journalists have seen, because many French people had been persuaded by their government that the vaccine would exempt them from all constraints, tests and contamination. But the vaccine is only there to save lives, by making possible Covid-19 contamination much less dangerous. It was a French doctor, Marie François Xavier Bichat, who explained in 1800 that life is “The set of functions that resist death”. To avoid landing in intensive care in one of the hospitals that today bear his name, there is no more effective method, while continuing to growl, than to be vaccinated to the rhythm of the virus and its symptoms. mutations.

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