Within 72 hours of the French learning they would soon need to be vaccinated or tested to go to the cafe, more than 3 million had booked appointments and France had broken its vaccination record, administering 800,000 shots in a single day.
At the same time, daily infections, driven by the more contagious Delta variant, continued to climb, reaching nearly 9,000 on Wednesday – and on Bastille Day, about 20,000 demonstrators nationwide protested against what some called a “dictatorship”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...astille-day-amid-anger-at-tighter-covid-rules
Polls show more than 65% public support for the range of measures unveiled by Emmanuel Macron on Monday, aimed, in the president’s words, not at “making vaccination immediately obligatory for everyone … but at pushing a maximum of you to go and get vaccinated”.
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Meanwhile, non-essential free coronavirus testing will also end in September, “to further encourage vaccination”, and healthcare professionals and retirement home workers who have not been vaccinated by 15 September will be suspended for a month to allow them to do so. Thereafter, they risk dismissal.
The big stick approach to vaccination, which goes further than that adopted by most governments, has had an immediate impact on take-up.
While 66% of French adults have received one dose and 53% are fully vaccinated, the number of first doses being administered had, in common with many western countries, started slowing as the campaign came up against more vaccine-hesitant or hard-to-reach groups.
However, in the hours after Macron’s announcement more than 20,000 slots a minute were being booked via Doctolib, France’s main medical appointments website, and Stanislas Niox-Chateau, the site’s chief executive, said vaccinations were set to accelerate rapidly to about 4.5m shots a week.
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