French Prime Minister Jean Castex said in an interview with CNN-affiliated BFMTV on Thursday that the country’s proposed vaccine pass would be “much more effective” than mandatory vaccination.
He said the government already had “difficulties in doing pass checks”. “We will have even more of them in the investigation of compulsory vaccination,” Castex said.
Distinguishing the two, Castex said that compulsory vaccination may be “fine”, but the country’s “objective is to get people vaccinated, it is not to fill the exchequer.”
The PM said that countries like Italy that were introducing compulsory vaccinations had vaccination levels “very, very low” compared to France.
Its aim is to get as many people vaccinated as possible. Compulsory vaccination is a means, a tool, an end tool,” Castex said.
Castex cited the example of some people in low-income neighborhoods who could generally choose to avoid medical care and who were not ideologically opposed to vaccination.
“Imposing fines on such people will not help us achieve our goal” [vaccination] objectives,” he said.
Some references: His remarks came after parliamentarians came to the lower house of France. approved a bill Earlier Thursday, the aim was to make it mandatory for people to show proof of vaccination to access many public places and inter-regional public transport. The bill, once passed by the Senate, would instead remove the option of being able to show a negative test result.
There has been a tense debate in France about how to deal with the disaffected minority of the population. The country has vaccinated about 74% of its total population, which is one of the higher rates in the European Union. But it has been heavily influenced by the more permeable Omicron variant, and has reported record infections in recent days.
French health officials told 332,252 The new Covid-19 cases on Wednesday represent a new record since the start of the pandemic for the second day running.
Infections have been rising for several weeks, with an average of 200,000 cases a day, according to the health ministry. While hospitalization rates have reached the highest rate since May, they are not rising as fast as infections so far.
But according to the French government, the majority of intensive care unit (ICU) patients are asymptomatic individuals. Health Minister Olivier Veran has said that for every vaccinated person in the ICU, there were 20 people who were not vaccinated.