Health care workers who have received only one dose of a vaccine will have to take a COVID-19 test every three days until they have completed their second dose—Oct. 15 is the deadline for both vaccines to be administered.
As of Sept. 7, about 84 percent of staff in care homes and health care facilities had received two vaccine shots, according to the French government.
‘It’s Not Ethical’
Emmanuel Chignon managed to keep his nursing care home in western France running through the worst of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, but now he’s confronting a new crisis: staff who would rather quit than comply with a government mandate that they be vaccinated.“We feel like we’re living through a third wave, but this time it’s a human resources wave,” Chignon said Sept. 14 at the nursing home he runs in Bordeaux, southwest of Paris.
Chignon explained that Macron’s new rules will leave him short of staff to care for residents: six or seven staff hadn’t had their shots by the time the mandate took effect, so would have to be removed from the work schedules.
Vanessa Perotti, a health care worker at “Hopital Beaujon” in Clichy, a working-class Paris suburb, is also among workers who decided not to get vaccinated and instead quit her job in the medical field.
“I’m disgusted. In any case, there’s nothing I can do. I just have to accept it,” she told Reuters during a union-led protest.
‘No Health Pass’
The vaccine mandate and France’s “health pass” system prompted massive protests for nine consecutive weekends, with another demonstration on Sept. 15 in Paris.
The vaccine passport, which is dubbed a health pass by the government, is required by people to enter restaurants, clubs, and a number of other public places. While some media outlets have attempted to characterize the demonstrations as “anti-vaccine,” many protesters have said they’re against vaccine passports and mandates, not the vaccines themselves.
“Whether we’re vaccinated or not, we’re against making it compulsory,” a nursing assistant in her 50s, who wished to remain anonymous, told AFP.
Vaccine passports have been flagged by a variety of organizations, including civil liberties groups, as creating a two-tier society of vaccinated and unvaccinated.
