10:00 am, March 7, 2021
THE EDITORIAL OF THE JDD. On Europe 1, the editorial director of the JDD, Hervé Gattegno, discusses the debate around the compulsory vaccination of caregivers.
–
Hello Hervé Gattegno. You come back this morning to a growing debate: should we oblige nursing staff to be vaccinated? The Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, asks them to do it “quickly” and you publish in the JDD this morning an appeal from all the health professions which goes in the same direction. And this situation makes you unworthy. Why?
Imagine that the Minister of National Education is reduced to asking teachers to speak French correctly; what would we say? The comparison is worth what it is worth, but we are facing an extremely serious pandemic, which has claimed 300,000 lives in one year; the number of contaminations increases every day, hospitals are once again on the verge of saturation. And the virus is transmitted a lot in hospitals, as we know – Covid has even become the first nosocomial disease in France. So it is unacceptable that the nursing staff do not consider high priority to be vaccinated. Because they are not playing their part in slowing the epidemic; and that in addition they send a catastrophic signal: their mistrust is as contagious as the virus.
Read also – Alain Fischer at JDD: “The effectiveness of vaccines is now certain”
Is the solution to make vaccination compulsory for doctors and nurses? Apparently, the government does not want to come to this …
It’s tricky because we don’t want to rob people who are on the front line – and that’s precisely why they should be vaccinated! Only a third of caregivers (and barely 4 out of 10 in nursing homes) have received at least one dose. Apart from those who are anti-vaccine (it seems crazy but there are also some among doctors), the main reason given is that the Astra Zeneca vaccine, the one offered to them, would not be effective enough, and in particular against variants – it must be said that Emmanuel Macron himself had said that it was useless for people over 65 … In reality, according to the most serious studies, it is as effective as the others for older, more effective than others against severe forms, and even if it does not work against all variants, this is not bad enough – we do not refuse the vaccine because it does not protect against all diseases. Against viruses, the “all or nothing” theory is necessarily the loser.
At a time when the government seeks to amplify the vaccination campaign, does the problem of the vaccination of caregivers not show that it has a persistent problem with the health workers?
Certainly – especially among the less qualified, there are still more vaccinated among doctors than among nurses, and there are much less among nursing assistants. Hence the hypothesis according to which the refusal of the vaccine would also be a form of protest. If this is true, it is truly appalling – to subordinate the fight against the epidemic to political criteria is not up to the mark. That said, we cannot exclude it because we have clearly seen, over the past year, to what extent categorical interests interfere with the public health imperative. Restaurant owners want to reopen (we understand them), the inhabitants of regions where the virus is weak would like to live normally. It is always said that France is the country of egalitarianism; on many subjects, it is also the country of selfishness.
–
