The French Senate adopted this Thursday at dawn the law that establishes the vaccination passport, which establishes the obligation to have all the doses to access most public places, including bars and restaurants.
(Read here: Macron warns that he wants to ‘screw’ the unvaccinated with restrictions)
The upper house, dominated by the conservative opposition, introduced some modifications with respect to the text that was adopted last week by the deputies, where the Government of Emmanuel macron it has a loose majority.
(Also: Use of masks in the open air, mandatory in Paris due to a wave of infections)
The fact that the text has not been approved identically delays somewhat the entry into force of the vaccination passport, which now has to be the subject of an agreement between deputies and senators, although the former have the last word.
The vaccination passport has caused a great controversy, but its adoption in the Senate shows that it has a great political consensus, since that House has a conservative majority and adopted it with 249 votes in favor and 63 against, among them several “macronistas “.
Once it enters into force, the passport indicating that you have the vaccination schedule Complete will be required to access places of leisure, transport and other places, and a negative test will no longer serve, as it has been until now.
(It may interest you: France suffers the fifth wave of covid with the fear that the country will be paralyzed)
Senators have introduced some amendments that the Government does not like, such as restrictions on its use linked to exceeding the figure of 10,000 hospitalized nationwide.
In addition, the text adopted by the Senate also excludes those under 18 years of age from the vaccination passport and eliminates the possibility for owners of bars and restaurants to verify the identity of customers to avoid falsifications.
Within the law, which has other provisions to fight the pandemic, the Senate also did not approve the sanctions for companies that oppose teleworking that the deputies had adopted at first reading.
Teachers’ strike against covid management
FranceAmong the countries with the most days of open schools during the pandemic, there is a major strike by teachers this Thursday, tired of the government’s management of the health crisis, three months before the presidential elections.
Since returning to school on January 3 after the break for the end of the year holidays, the government announced up to three different protocols in schools, exasperating teachers and attracting criticism from the opposition.
On Monday night, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced the latest, slightly looser protocol to try, in vain, to defuse the tension. The teachers continued the strike, with the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, in their sights.
“Not only does the current protocol not protect students, staff and their families, but it completely disrupts the school,” said the majority union in primary school, Snuipp-FSU, which called for a strike last Friday.
When a positive case is detected in a class, the rest of the students must carry out up to three self-tests at home to continue attending school, without having to undergo a first antigen test or PCR as previously.
The previous measures had caused long lines in front of pharmacies of parents who in many cases left their work to submit a test to their children, so that they could return to class the next day in case of negative.
Almost 12 million diagnostic tests were carried out like this last week, an increase of 44%, according to the Health Ministry. The most significant increase was in the group under 16 years of age, which went from 1 million to 3 million on average.
France, a country of 67 million inhabitants, registers an increase in cases of covid-19 due to the omicron variant. The average number of daily infections in the last seven days was 287,603, up from the average of 198,200 in the previous week.
Given the situation, most unions supported the call of the Snuipp-FSU, which estimated the percentage of primary school teachers who will go on strike at 75 percent. The Ministry of Education announced a follow-up of 38.5 percent.
“The school will be closed this Thursday (…) There will be no reception of children,” read a poster in a nursery school in the northeast of Paris. The neighboring elementary school only opened one class on this cold winter Thursday.
Despite the fact that the strike implies that parents seek solutions to take care of their children, resorting to teleworking or babysitting when they can, the main federation of parents of students, FCPE, supports the protest.
“Families do not understand anything (…) We have the impression that what is sought is a herd immunity. The current protocol does not allow to protect children,” Alice Gregorio, head of the FCPE in the northeast, told AFP. from Paris.
The strike could affect the image of French President Emmanuel Macron, who has not yet confirmed his long-awaited candidacy for the April presidential election and whose strategy is to keep schools open during the pandemic.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), France closed primary schools for 34 days from January 2020 to May 2021, less than Mexico (214), Brazil (178), Colombia (152), Chile ( 98) or Spain (45).
“They can say that the schools were open, but only half of the classes were full,” said Gregorio, for whom the COVID crisis aggravated the already persistent lack of personnel resources and materials in the classrooms.
Brice Tenturier, a political scientist at Ipsos, told AFP that the French have so far a good image of the government’s handling of the crisis, but warns that, if the strike is massive, “this balance could be broken.”
Macron’s eventual rivals in the presidential election, from the radical left to the extreme right, were quick to charge against his management, which caused, according to the right-wing Valérie Pécresse, “general disorder and chaos in the school.”
EFE and AFP
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