The deputies of France begin to examine this Monday a bill that wants to transform the current health passport into a vaccination passport, which provokes much criticism at a time when the cases of COVID-19 by the omicron variant are multiplying.
Legislators will analyze this afternoon the bill “to strengthen the tools for managing the health crisis” and which is the subject of more than 650 amendments.
After its processing in the French lower house (the National Assembly), this project must go through a commission in the Senate on Wednesday, to later be approached in plenary, with a view to an approval towards the end of the week, to enter effective January 15.
The Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, defended that the text goes in the direction of “science” and “responsibility”, at a time when France chained several days with more than 200,000 new cases.
The government’s goal is for this law to put more pressure on the nearly five million French people over 12 years of age who are not yet vaccinated, out of a total population of 67 million.
If this measure becomes law, these unvaccinated people will not be able to go, for example, to a restaurant, a museum, a gym or the cinema or use certain transports. Because it will no longer be enough, as up to now, to present a recent negative diagnostic test, which will continue to be valid when accessing health services.
And to have a valid vaccination passport, citizens will not be able to wait, from February 15, more than four months between the second and third dose. The current maximum time frame was seven months between the second and third doses.
The bill also provides for the sanctions to be toughened. For example, using a fake vaccination passport will be punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros (US $ 85,000) and showing someone else’s passport will be punished with a fine of 1,000 euros (US $ 1,136).
Although for the deputy Yael Braun-Pivet, from the government party, LREM, the vaccination passport will allow “avoiding much more restrictive measures” such as confinements or curfews, the opposition has been more critical.
Thus, the far-left party La France Insoumise (insubmissible France) denounces a “brutal measure” that it claims to provide “illusory protection”.
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