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Business News/ News / World/  France, once a vaccine pioneer, is top skeptic in Covid-19 pandemic
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France, once a vaccine pioneer, is top skeptic in Covid-19 pandemic

wsj

Covid-19 vaccination campaign off to a glacial start, as it meets some of the world’s highest skepticism rates. ‘I can’t be the guinea pig’

Photo: APPremium
Photo: AP

Audrey Courreges’s mistrust of new coronavirus vaccines runs so deep that she’s told the nursing home where she works, in the southern French town of Beziers, that she won’t take the vaccinations or administer them.

“I have a brain. I’m capable of forming my own ideas," the 33-year-old nurse says. “There is some mistrust of the authorities on my part, when you see how the crisis has been managed in France from the start."

France’s mass vaccination campaign is off to a glacial start, with only around 422,000 people receiving the vaccine in more than three weeks since European regulators authorized the drug, far behind most other developed nations. A big reason: French officials are running up against deeply ingrained opposition that has made France among the world’s top vaccine skeptics.

An Ipsos poll conducted in December found that France ranked at the bottom of 15 countries on willingness to take a Covid-19 vaccine, with only 40% of the public saying they wanted the shot. Polls show that more than three-quarters of nursing home workers—who are among the government’s first target groups for the vaccine—don’t want to take it.

The resistance has historical roots in the 19th century, when antivaccination groups campaigned against modern inoculation techniques discovered by Frenchman Louis Pasteur. In recent years, it has been fueled by widespread distrust of the government of President Emmanuel Macron, who has faced years of protests from the antiestablishment yellow-vests movement.

Officials face the additional burden of easing public concerns about the new technology behind the vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc., BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. These vaccines rely on so-called messenger RNA, named after the molecules that deliver instructions for cells to make proteins, a technology studied for years in clinical trials but never used before in mass vaccinations.

Skeptics have incorrectly claimed that the vaccines can alter the human genome. Regulators have approved the vaccines based on studies conducted by the companies that showed the vaccines prevent Covid-19 with 95% effectiveness. Side effects such as fatigue were common, but severe “adverse effects" were rare, regulators have said.

The government’s efforts to assuage the skepticism have so far backfired. Authorities established elaborate consent procedures for the first target population, nursing home residents and personnel, to head off criticism that they were pushing the vaccines on the public.

As authorities struggled to sign up nursing home personnel and residents, they opened vaccinations to other target groups, such as health care workers more broadly and all people 75 and older. They have also attempted to streamline the process by allowing oral rather than written consent from residents and shortening the medical consultation needed before getting the shot.

Nursing home workers like Ms. Courreges, however, are proving to be a significant obstacle in the campaign. She says she isn’t against vaccines generally, but that the messenger RNA technology hasn’t been adequately tested or proven to be effective, despite the fact that regulators around the world have said the opposite.

“There is a real failure among nursing home personnel and caregivers related to the virus," said Sabrina Deliry, whose 80-year-old mother lives in a nursing home in western Paris. Ms. Deliry said the facility has informed her that a small percentage of the personnel have agreed to be vaccinated. Adding to her worries: Her mother is also refusing to be vaccinated, after she caught the flu several years ago despite receiving her annual flu shot.

Such intergenerational fights are breaking out across the country over the vaccine. Alain Cardeau, 80, a retired information technology worker, doesn’t want to be vaccinated but his daughters are pressuring him to accept it. Mr. Cardeau said he’s heard a lot of conflicting reports about the vaccine on television.

“There aren’t two doctors who have said the same thing," Mr. Cardeau said. “If I get vaccinated, it’s because I’m being forced to by my children."

Polls show that French attitudes toward the vaccine have been colored by politics, with critics of Mr. Macron’s government on the far-right and the far-left more likely to be skeptical of the vaccine. Mr. Cardeau is a member of Force Jaune, part of the yellow-vest movement, and has campaigned against Mr. Macron since 2016 when he was economy minister.

Sophie Tissier, the 41-year-old founder of Force Jaune, recently wrote on her Facebook page that the messenger RNA vaccines were a danger to humanity.

“I am very, very, very skeptical," Ms. Tissier said in an interview. “I have no confidence in what the government is telling people."

Opposition politicians have also piled on, shaking public confidence in the new vaccines. “I can’t be the guinea pig of those who say, go ahead and take it," said Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the far-left France Unbowed party, on national television last week.

Some of the world’s first antivaccination groups arose in France toward the end of the 19th century as Louis Pasteur pioneered the technique of using attenuated viruses to stimulate immunity. The Universal League of Antivaccinators was founded in France in 1880 to oppose proposals to make the smallpox vaccine obligatory. The league wrote to the French government three years later to oppose a government pension for Mr. Pasteur, calling his discoveries “disappointments and disasters."

Pockets of resistance have flourished in the 20th century. The National League for Liberty in Vaccination, a French nonprofit founded in 1953, is one of the oldest antivaccine groups. France has been slower to adopt vaccines against diseases such as measles and rubella than the U.S. and some other developed countries.

France has lower rates of vaccine coverage for measles than much of Europe—90% of young children have at least one shot, compared with more than 95% in Germany, Spain and Sweden—and has suffered periodic outbreaks over the years. Experts say at least 95% of the public needs to be inoculated to stop outbreaks of a highly contagious disease such as measles. The government made the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination mandatory in 2018 to boost coverage.

Jean-Pierre Joseph, a 74-year-old lawyer in Grenoble, said he has never been vaccinated, based on the recommendation of his grandfather, who was a doctor. “My grandfather told my mother that it’s a lie," he said.

Mr. Joseph has represented clients who have sued the government over previous vaccination campaigns, such as a much-criticized effort to fight the swine flu epidemic in 2009. This time, Mr. Joseph has been lobbying those in his family and at work not to take the Pfizer vaccine. “Many people are afraid because they know it’s not a normal vaccine."

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text

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