Here is a pretty conundrum. France, cradle of the enlightenment and birthplace of Cartesian logic, is also a snake-pit of conspiracy theories. French “touch-and-see” rationalism and French “it’s-all-a giant-fiddle” scepticism sometimes align. They can also collide. And nowhere is this more true than for vaccinations. France, the home of Louis Pasteur, of Pierre and Marie Curie, is more opposed to them than any other country in the world.
The news of the Pfizer and BioNTech breakthrough in the development of a vaccine against Covid-19 was greeted across the world with cautious relief and delight. In France, there was some delight — but also suspicion and even anger. International research by Gallup last year reported that one in three French people believed all vaccines to be dangerous — the highest percentage of the 144 countries surveyed. This week, an Ipsos survey suggested that 46% of French adults will refuse — or say they will refuse — the Pfizer jab or any other kind of anti-Covid jab. (Compared to 36% in the United States, 30% in Germany, 21% in Britain and 16% in India.)
Strangely, opposition appears to have increased as the vaccine looked more likely to appear. An Ipsos survey in September found that 41% of French adults would refuse any Covid jab. With “herd immunity” estimated to require 60 to 70% coverage of a given population, the pandemic appears to have a long and prosperous future in France.
Anti-vax feeling has been spreading throughout the developed word in recent years (much less so in poorer countries, which know a thing or two about infectious diseases). But why should the opposition be so powerful in France? Are the survey figures reliable?
Laurent-Henri Vignaud, a French historian who has studied the rise and fall of anti-vax movements, is sceptical. It’s not always a good idea, he suggests, to take the French public at its word — and certainly not on this subject. “The only other countries broadly as anti-vaccine as the French are the Russians and the Mongolians,” he says. “Countries where government is widely held in disrepute. What we are looking at here, I think, is a transfer of suspicion. For many years 30-40% of the French have been vastly sceptical of all politicians and all media.”
He concludes that, “this deep pessimism has spilled over to the question of vaccines”. Wide-scale rejection of mainstream politics exists in other countries, but takes an especially acute form in France, where the traditional centre-Left/centre-Right pattern of politics has all but collapsed. The poor performance of recent governments offers a partial explanation. But France’s aggressively suspicious attitude towards authority is not a new phenomenon.
As he describes it, there is a core of people who are viscerally anti-vax, “people who use arguments on natural health or because they believe conspiracy theories of the far-Right or the far-Left”. But there is another group, he says, who are simply sceptical or negative about whatever the government proposes. “But I doubt they will all refuse in the end to take a Covid vaccine?” he says.
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