Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in France today to protest for the
sixth consecutive Saturday
against the need to have a
health certificate
for much of the activities of social life, perceived in practice as an obligation to get vaccinated.
About two hundred marches were organized throughout the country with a very heteroclite public, socially and politically, and with two basic elements that united them: their opposition to the health certificate and their rejection of French President Emmanuel Macron.
In Montpellier, where the Prefecture estimated the participation in 9,500 people,
incidents
took place
between protesters from the extreme right and the extreme left who in that case had coincided in a single procession.
In other large cities, the calls were made separately and thus the differences and nuances could be seen.
Four manifestations
In Paris there were four and the most numerous, as in the preceding weeks, was organized by Florian Philippot, former right-hand man of the leader of the French far-right,
Marine Le Pen,
who after leaving her party has created a dissident nationalist movement, Los Patriotas.
Philippot harangued the thousands of people who gathered in the Denfert Rochereau square, he congratulated himself on the great profusion of French flags, he was convinced that today's was "a show of force" and he did not deprive himself of charging against
"the injunctive mandates of the macronist power ".
In fact, the proclamations of the assistants against the head of state, with an evident political intention eight months before the presidential elections, were almost as frequent as the shouts to
demand "freedom"
and to complain about the need for a health certificate to go to a bar or restaurant.
Philippot also wanted to dedicate this new day of parades to the controversial microbiologist Didier Raoult, who in 2020 defended the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment against Covid despite the conclusions of different investigations that did not demonstrate the usefulness of that drug.
The reason is that the head of the public hospitals in Marseille has announced that he intends to remove Raoult from the direction of the city's Hospital University Institute (IHU) with the official argument that in a short time the professor will be 70 years old and will arrive at retirement age.
At the head of Philippot's procession there was also a small group of health
workers
who wanted to denounce the obligation that has been imposed on this group to be
vaccinated
in order to continue working after September 15.
Conspiracy theses
One of the assistants, who works in administrative functions in a hospital and who said she was not vaccinated because she considers that those that have been developed against Covid are not sufficiently proven, justified the protest because in her opinion
"the health certificate is an attack against freedom".
The woman denounced that "health terrorism is being carried out on us" and that the consequences of the pandemic have been magnified.
He said that he doubts "a lot about all the statistics that they teach us on television about rehearsals."
In fact, despite being a minority in the processions,
the conspiracy theses were once again well present this Saturday,
with banners like one in which the vaccination campaign was blamed for 982 deaths in France.
Another demonstration in the capital, which came out of the Plaza de la Bolsa, had a totally different atmosphere, with the marked presence of "yellow vests".
The French Government, which decided to generalize the use of the health certificate in the face of a vaccination rate that was losing steam at the beginning of the summer, is now facing a similar phenomenon that this time is probably explained by the holidays.
With 41 million people fully vaccinated,
61% of the population has received the full
immunization
schedule
, but the rate of inoculations has slowed down sharply.
In three weeks it has gone from 4.8 to 3.2 million weekly injections.
Despite everything, the Ministry of Health remains confident of meeting the goal set by Macron of reaching
50 million people who have received at least one dose by the end of August.
The greatest urgency at this time, because the epidemic has rampaged, is in overseas departments and territories such as Martinique, Guadeloupe or French Polynesia, where this Saturday a tightening
of confinement measures
was announced
.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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Paris
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